A Tale of Five Villages...In One Day

When most people talk about traveling through Italy, they will tell you that you can't leave without making a trip to Cinque Terre. I had been to Italy five years before this and missed taking that trip and Luke had heard many things about it from friends who had been so we were determined to make it out there while we were (relatively) close.

On our last day in Venice, we did a last minute hotel search, bought our train tickets and were on our way. We realized that we would be traveling from the east coast all the way across to the west coast so this would be no small train journey. Thankfully, Italy is not that big so six hours and three train changes later and we were at our destination.

We decided to stay in a town just on the outskirts of Cinque Terre for budget reasons. We weren't sure of what we would find but were pleasantly surprised to see that we would be staying in a "real" town. Going from tourist area to tourist area, you forget that there are towns and cities that aren't frequented by tourists and high prices and can be just as charming as the main thoroughfares.

La Spezia was built right into the hill going into the sea and had a market area with shops and cheap restaurants and all of the usual charming italian things.

After a good night's sleep we were on the local train to take us a quick 10 minutes to the first of the five villages of Cinque Terre. Cinque Terre is a series of five villages, perched on cliffs overlooking the sea and connected by a 9 km long hiking trail. Before roads connected these villages this trail was the only way of going back and forth between the villages. We started at the southern-most village of Riomaggiore and worked our way up. Here are some pictures of the cliffs as we got started.

After Riomaggiore, came Manarola which boasts some swimming coves that we were unable to partake of since the water was uncharacteristically rough that day. For most of the villages we started above them on the trail and descended into them, spent some time exploring them and then continued on. Next was Corniglia.
Vernazza came after Corniglia and this was our favorite. There was an ancient church and an old castle with a sweeping view of the sea and the cliffs.
The last village was Monterosso and it was pretty strenuous going. We hiked through olive groves and alongside terraced hilltops. Up rough stone stairs, down rough stone stairs, we navigated switchbacks all before we started our descent into the last town.
Our weary feet deposited us at a rocky beach where we jumped into the sea to wash the dust and grime from the last five hours. The water was refreshing until...we got pounded with some strong waves and rolled around until we had rocks in our suits and salt in our eyes. Laughing, we decided that was enough refreshment for one day, dried off and got on the train to take it back to our hotel.