A Vacation in Italy - Cinque Terre and Piedmont

Day One – Travelling and Wine

The alarm woke us up with its insistent beeping at the ungodly hour of 5am. We’d only gotten to bed at 12:30 the night before so weren’t particularly perky at that hour, especially with a full day of travel ahead of us.

It took us an hour to get ready, two hours to get to Stanstead airport to wait two hours for our flight. Two and a half hours after we took off (most of which I slept through) we landed in Genoa – oddly the runway of the Genoa airport is built right out over the sea, you can’t see land until the plane is a couple dozen feet above it, which is pretty low when it looks like it’s going to be a water landing.

From Genoa airport we caught the bus into the main part of town so that we could sit and wait for the train. We were lucky enough to sit in front of an older couple who didn’t stop complaining the entire ride – the instructions at the bus ticket machine weren’t clear enough (we bought our tickets without any problems), the instructions given by the bus driver weren’t clear (seemed okay to me), no one could understand when she spoke Italian to them (I speak a little Italian – enough to know that what she was speaking wasn’t it)...I’ve never come so close to actually punching someone to make them stop talking while on vacation.

We finally made it to Genoa Prinicpe train station with absolutely no violence perpetrated on anyone, which was quite an achievement as far as I was concerned. We had a horrid little lunch in the train station while we waited for our train (why is it that train stations always have the most dire cafes?). The train itself was somewhat uneventful – two hours winding along the Ligurian coast on our way to Manarola, the fourth of the five villages of the Cinque Terra.

The directions from the train station to our little hotel couldn’t have been simpler to follow – leave the train, go through a tunnel, turn right, then turn right again, walk to the last house before the sea. The room is smallish but nicely decorated with a full-sized bed, closet with mini fridge and safe, and a full bathroom (toilet, sink, full size shower, but no hot water as it turns out).

On our was to the hotel, we’d stopped at a little grocery store to pick up essential supplies – a couple bottles of wine. After dropping off our bags, we walked up the stairs to the little balcony overlooking the ocean and sat down for a quick drink. An hour (and a bottle of wine) later, we headed back into town to meet our friends Sam and Chelsea for dinner – oddly we’d discovered a few days before leaving that we’d both be in the same town at the same time.

We found them without too much bother (as the town is ridiculously small) and made reservations at one of the five restaurants for dinner later that evening. In the meantime, we went up to their room overlooking the town for a glass or two of wine while we watched the sunset.

After the wine, dinner was excellent. We’d heard that the food in the Cinque Terra wasn’t that good, but our first meal was excellent and relatively cheap. I had anchovies in lemon sauce (not fishy or salty at all – definitely not tinned anchovies) and Jamie had swordfish carpaccio – I’m not sure if swordfish is a local fish but it’s certainly on all the menus. We followed that by the mixed seafood grill for me and pesto lasagne for Jamie (pesto being a local speciality). Both were excellent – far better than expected. Unfortunately the four bottles of wine that the four of us shared on top of the bottle of wine we had before dinner went a bit to our heads, so after a long supper (we closed the place down), Jamie and I headed back up the hill for bed. Apparently we had another glass of wine on the balcony, however I don’t recall this at all – the evidence (open wine bottle, used glasses) though speaks for itself.

Day Two – Walking and Sunburn

We had to get up fairly early this morning – we hadn’t actually met anyone the previous day when we checked in as the owner of the hotel wasn’t available. Again the alarm went off far too early (although it was 8:15 this time, rather than 5am) and we were forced to get up against our will.

We met the lady who I think we were supposed to – it was a little hard to tell as she spoke almost no English and my Italian has really disappeared in the last 3 years. At any rate, she took our passport details and filled in the relevant paperwork.

We were a bit peckish at this point, and I was in dire need of a cup of coffee, so we headed into town to look for somewhere to have breakfast. We found a place just above the main harbour and had cappuccinos and pastries and wondered if the cloud cover would clear up.

After breakfast we quickly went down to the water to see how cold it was. It’s the Med, so I was surprised that it felt a bit cold. Oh well. We walked back up the hill and through the tunnel to the train station and the start of the Via del Amore walk to Riomaggiore, the next town from us. We bought our slightly expensive tickets which gave us three days access to the paths between the towns (€10 each – not too bad for 3 days I suppose) and headed off toward the horizon.

They say that hell is other people, and I’m pretty sure they were all on that path this morning. It was queue after queue after queue the whole way. I was ready to leap off the edge most of the walk over, with tour after tour going past (why do the insist on taking up the WHOLE path?) and large groups of elderly slow-walkers ahead of us.

We finally made it to Riomaggiore and found all the people that weren’t yet on the path standing around at the entrance to the path. Took us 5 minutes just to get through the horde, again without violence on my part, which was a major achievement
We took the long way round to the main part of town in an effort to avoid the crowd (and we didn’t see the shortcut to be honest). We got into the main part of town and relatively quickly found a bank machine (the one in Manarola was broken and were had no cash). We got some money and walked down to the harbour. Not that much going on down there, and we were getting hungry, so after sitting on a rock for a bit watching the water (and some young people across the harbour mix champagne and orange juice in plastic cups) we went back up to the Co Op grocery store to buy a picnic lunch.

I spent some time throwing some peaches around (okay, so I dropped them) and buying various implement of lunch including water and orange juice (we’re so healthy). We then went to a take away pizza place and bought some pizza made on focaccia bread and walked to the rocky beach just past Riomaggiore. Lunch was fantastic, and the peach was possibly the best piece of fruit I’ve ever eaten – it tasted like actual sunshine, despite the soft bit on one side from where I’d dropped it.

After lunch we felt that it was time to head back to Manarola, but were not looking forward to the walk back with all the people. It turned out that the big crowd was only there for the morning – there were very few people out by the afternoon. It hardly took us any time to get back to the hotel and settle in for an afternoon of reading on the balcony in the sun, drinking wine and relaxing.

A few hours and a sunburn later, we went back into town to have dinner at a restaurant recommended by Sam and Chelsea the previous night. Not as good as dinner the evening before, but still not bad. Dinner was followed by a few minutes getting drenched in the surf, then a bottle of wine at the little local bar, with live guitar and an owner with a predilection for singing in Italian – a classic end to a classic day.

Day Three – Walking, Walking, Walking

Jamie decided that despite our talk of having a Monday morning lie-in, that 8:30am would be a good time to get up. Something about not being tired anymore and unable to sleep...I dunno, I was in the middle of a very odd yet intriguing dream involving a deserted house, neoprene knee braces, and ill-fitting baseball caps.

We hadn’t been overly impressed with our €5 per person breakfast the previous day so decided after getting a move-on that we’d try something new. €6 total at the new place next door to the expensive place got us a cappuccino each and a better croissant – this one with apricot jam in, as is the Italian style.

After breakfast, Jamie forced me onto the trail towards Corniglia, the next village along in the chain of five villages. We immediately got lost, as we followed the signs someone had posted with little arrows pointing to what turned out to be the high road/red route, rather than the much easier/lower blue route. It didn’t take us long hiking up into the mountains to realize our mistake and head back down to the lazy route – to be fair, both of us were wearing our flip-flops and definitely weren’t prepared for full-on mountaineering.

The hike turned out to be more difficult than the one between Manarola and Riomaggiore, which was a full-paved and bar-enhanced stroll by contrast. The Manarola-Corniglia path was much less paved and didn’t include a bar at all, a major disappointment as we hadn’t thought to pack water or wine for the trip and developed a massive thirst on the way.

After finding the correct path, we reached the train station at Corniglia without much drama and were presented with a moral dilemma – wait for the lazy touristic bus to take us up the hill into the town, or brave the 360-odd stairs up. Jamie, being the patient fan of waiting for things, including public transit like buses, insisted that we take the stairs. It was a long way up. A very long way.

It turned out that Corniglia, after all those stairs, wasn’t actually all that special. We checked out the views from Piazza Santa Margharita and from the tower at the top of the village before stopping for a slice of pizza (in the Cinque Terra, they make pizza on focaccia bread – it tastes even better than it sounds, if such a thing is even possible) and sat down to wait for the bus back down to the train station. It took a long time, so long that we decided not to wait, and walked back down the stairs.

We bought our tickets for the train, validated them, and rushed over to the appropriate platform for the train over to Vernazza, the second village on our tour for the day. It was at this point that we checked the train schedule. For reasons that remain unexplained, the train schedule in the Cinque Terre is a bit erratic. There are times during the day when there is a train every 10 minutes or so, and other times when there is an hour or two gap between them. Guess which we managed to get?

An hour of patiently sitting later, we caught the train to Vernazza. Three minutes later, we were there. Our hour of waiting apparently saved us two hours of major off-pavement mountain hiking, not appropriate for sandals and lazy people. I think it was worth it, and not just because I had an ice cream while I was waiting.

It seems that all of the people that were annoying on the path to Riomaggiore the previous day had decided to make their way to Vernazza. It was the biggest and most touristy of the four villages we’d visited and we weren’t immediately impressed, although to be fair I think the villages are at their best in the evenings when the tours and large groups of Italian students go home. We walked through town towards the harbour, noticing the end of the walking path from Corniglia on our way...poor sods who’d decided to walk it.

There had been rain over night the previous night and the waves had drastically increased in size over the previous day – there wasn’t much swimming going on in the protected beach area, and quite a bit of the harbour was blocked off by red ropes and massive waves.

We found a restaurant right on the waterfront and had a tasty lunch of bruschetta and pizza and possibly some wine, just for something different. We had a nice chat to some Americans who were sitting at the table beside us, and we all agreed that the local yokels who chose to disregard all the red barriers and jump off the end of the jetty into the waves were probably idiots. Pretty much everybody who saw them do it stood up in horror, and one tourist guy ran to try to save them (he had the look of a professional lifeguard about him). They stayed in the water for about 10 minutes, then popped back out onto the jetty like the penguins did in that movie about penguins. I got into the act as well, sitting as close as I could to the breaking waves without actually putting my life in much actual danger. I’m a dare devil, I know – “carefully considered risk taking” is my middle name (my parents thought Danger was too cliché for a middle name).

Lunch and adrenaline-rush had both been checked off our list of things to do for the afternoon. All that was left for Vernazza was a trip up the bloody mountain to take some more pictures. The recent month of torrential rains meant that the trail from Vernazza to Monterosso was closed, but this being Italy nothing prevented us from walking quite a way up it to get our shot – the things we do for our photography.
Our train timing was only slight better on the way home – we managed to get to the station, buy tickets, validate them, and rush onto the train, sort of. I made it on without a problem, but Jamie got tangled up in a group of elderly Americans who were having a very loud discussion questioning if they were on platform One right under the sign indicating that they were on platform one, and more crucially for Jamie, right in front of the door to the train. It closed while Jamie was about half-way through getting on. This was not good. She managed to squeeze through with only a large black mark on her arm which I’m sure will become a bruise and a squished camera bag (fortunately the camera wasn’t in the bag).

The train back to Manarola was definitely the way to go, rather than the death march we would have faced had we chosen to walk it. We stopped back at the room for some quality time on the balcony with a bottle of wine and a fresh application of suntan lotion. It was decided that there are few ways to spend an afternoon/early evening that come even close to comparing to the sheer awesomeness of wine, sun, loungy-style deck chairs, and wine.

Dinner was up the hill at Dal Billy (I think Billy is a local type of lobster, but I could be making that up – have I mentioned the wine?). We’d heard great things about this restaurant and had booked our table on Saturday night to make sure we could get a spot outside. We were seated quickly and the waiter recommended the mixed seafood platter to start as a sharing plate. It was excellent and we were excited about the main dish based on the quality of the starter. Unfortunately the shared pasta with crab didn’t live up to expectation. By the time we got through cracking all the bits of crab and getting the meat out, the pasta had gone cold. Beyond that, they had cracked a fair bit of crab before serving it and we both spent most of the main course picking little bits of crab shell out of our mouths. Not the most enjoyable main course we’d ever had.

Dinner finished, we walked back down the hill for a nightcap of wine on the balcony. We were both tired, but very relaxed and happy with the day – two villages, a relatively strenuous hike, an ice cream, some wine, some carefully considered danger...what more could one ask for?