La Riviera di Levanti

Today, we found a village like what I thought Cinque Terre was going to be in my at-home fantasies. There are many villages like this one in the area--in fact, many mountain tops have them spilling down the sides, crowned by a church with a steeple. It's just that they don't have restaurants, and they probably aren't in any guidebooks, and they haven't been promoted by the Italian gov't or themselves. I could be wrong about this, but as we walked through the village of Legnaro, it seemed that we were trespassing. There were no keep-out signs, but we whispered to each other, and we saw no one. It was beautiful, and the views were terrific. There were two agriturismos attached to the village, but evidently they are hard to find, because the only other two people we saw in Legnaro were a man and a woman looking for Agriturismo I Pipette. Oh. And you can't drive into the village because the streets are too tight.


After Legnaro, we drove up the coast to Portofino. Giancarlo recommended it to us, saying it was very beautiful. We drove on the two lane road through the mountains through pine forests and away from the ocean until we came down at a town called Sestri Levante. It was a tired, closed up beach town, the kind of place that's awash with the worst kind of tourists in the summer and boarded up and dead in the winter.

After that, the towns on the coast improved beginning with Chiavari. We had heard from the woman who bought my old Audi that Rapallo was an interesting town, "Italians keep it for themselves," she said. Whether or not that is true, we didn't see any Americans there. We stopped for lunch at 4:00. We haven't gotten our schedules right yet, and I was frantic with hunger. We had beaten the bushes in Sestri Levante looking for something to eat with no luck. The groceries and delis close between 1-4, and many restaurants don't open for lunch. In that town, it meant no food except at the gas station, and I was not going to eat a cold hot dog no matter how hungry I was. I would have had to go much longer without food to settle for something like that in Italy! I ate an emergency fruit and nut bar, and we forged on, but I wasn't nice. I blame Chris when we don't eat lunch because he's like a camel with food. No, no, nothing for me. I can just live on clouds and water! And when I get hungry, I better get fed or someone's going to get hurt.


Lucky for us, we both survived and had a really nice lunch on the seaside promenade in Rapallo. The place made a beautiful insalata Rapalloise (like a Nicoise, the waitress said, but with cooked ham and other Italian things) and sausages with beans (and funghi). Delicious, healthy, satisfying.

Rapallo's seaside promenade is full of faded Belle Epoque mansions. In fact, all up the Ligurian Riviera from Levanto to Portofino, there are astoundingly gorgeous, old huge homes on the seaside. More wondering about the kind of money it takes to finance those mansions.

Santa Margherita Ligure was full of elegant 5-star hotels, and Portofino reeks of money, but interestingly enough, it is (on the face of it) the most humble. It's seemingly simple but colorful buildings are pressed up against the steep cliffs, its bay small, and the real estate niggardly. We walked from one end of the promenade to the other in 10 minutes at a very leisurely stroll. Huge yachts are anchored in front of the humble ocean frontbuildings, but up on the hills above the village are the houses of the rich.

How do they get up there? The roads are hidden. The shops are evenly divided between T-shirts vendors, hand-embroidered froufrou sellers, and Gucci and high end jewelry and watch stores. It has the cleanest parking garage in the world (well, in my little experience of such things) where the hoi poloi have to park, and there's an electric sign around the corner from the entrance to the village that tells visitors how long they have to wait to get in. I suppose that may be tough if you live there...unless, of course, they come in the back...

The Walk of Love-Via dell' Amore

More about Cinque Terre: We took the train down to the most southern town on the route, Riomaggiore. The towns look gorgeous from above, falling down the hillside, and the sea and the rugged mountains are beautiful. Only two of the five towns have any sort of beach, and the towns themselves are pretty bare bones except for the places set up to serve the tourists. These are closest to the ocean. Of the towns that don't have a beach, one has a hollowed out stone cove for a port, which is no port at all, for a boat can't really enter it and tie up, and because it's so rocky, they probably can't anchor, either. In this town, the boats are put on dollies, like the large carts at Costco or Lowes, but without the handles. The fishermen push them up a steep stone ramp into the town to stow them. It must be hard work to do that each day, requiring several men to get the boat (with the outboard motor) out of the water and up the hill.
College kids, their bodies slick as seals, swim in the rocky cove. We watch their rituals from above: the girls pulling at their tiny suits, the boys acting as if they don't notice.


About the railroad: I knew that the train runs up and down the coast, far further south than Cinque Terre and far further north. The local trains do stop in each of the little towns so that tourists can hike or visit and get on and off the train. I had envisioned something like (as a woman sitting across from us put it) a chug-a-chug train. Or something that would allow us to look out the window at the beautiful countryside as we traveled from town to town. Silly me! The terrain is so rugged that the rail is cut through the mountains, so the passage from each town is mostly in black tunnels. Even if it was light, the windows on the train are so smudged that it's hard to get much of a view.

The trails: beginning on the first leg of the trails from south to north, The Via dell' Amore is by far the most sedate and least interesting. The way is paved, and as Marie White told me, “It's not a hike, it's like walking on the sidewalk.” For this I was worried about my shoes? There were old ladies (older much than I) in flip flops. There is also an astonishing and off-putting amount of graffiti. It's on the rocks, it's carved into the leaves of the agave, and it's on every wood surface. Lovers have taken the opportunity to immortalize their love, or at least immoralize it (a venal sin, surely), by carving and tagging everything. This is not what I envisioned on the way of love.

The second section of the trail is much more interesting because it's actually a hike. There are places where the ground is rough and it's even a little scary (if you're an acrophobiac like I am). The incredibly blue Mediterranean sea is splashing below on the rugged cliffs, which are shot through with so many complex layers of rock that they look like petrified wood in places, whorled and gnarly. It was much more satisfying because it was a slice of nature, and by then 2/3 of the strollers had dropped out, so instead of a section of Disneylandia, it was just a well-traveled path.

Cinque Terre in October

We are in our third day in Italy, staying in the town of Levanto (in the photo above). I hesitate to use the word jet-lagged for how we feel. We are in another atmosphere, landed on a planet where night and day roll around each other with no distinction. Sometimes my eyes snap shut with such force that it shocks me. The chemicals of sleep bathe my brain, and I have no control, dropping off to sleep with my head lolling. Unfortunately this rarely happens at bedtime or in the middle of the night, when I am wide awake. I have had two nights of two hours of sleep; one over the Atlantic, the other here in Levanto at the Agriturismo Villanova. I have finished two novels in those long night hours, and stayed up without napping during the day in the hope of sleeping well the next night.

One of the graces of traveling to Europe is sleeping through most of the flight. If one can. The tortures of the too-small seats--I had less than two inches on either side of my mine--and the upright posture are vague disturbances if you're asleep. Awake, they are acutely inescapable miseries; the flight is interminable. I pity those larger than I.

But meantime, we are in Italy and the weather is beautiful. We are staying near the Cinque Terre, a series of five Ligurian villages that are linked by paths that run above the ocean on rocky slopes and cliffs. The only way to reach the towns was by train or ferry. A new highway opened the area up for tourism, and they are enjoying a new source of economic growth.

Our town, Levanto, has a nice beach and boardwalk, and the shops have terrific food. We got a pan of take-out lasagna bolognese that was the best ever. One of the glories of Italy is the prepared food in the markets and shops!


As we eat in the beauty of the terrace of the Villanuova, with the picture-postcard view, Giro keeps us company.

The truth about the Cinque Terre, just to set the record straight for those who think of it only as a hazy, sun-soaked stretch of unspoiled Italy, is that even in mid-October, there are many, many tourists here. There is nothing undiscovered about it, and bus loads of Germans, teenagers on fall school jaunts, and guided tours unload at the train stations.

Back in Santa Fe, Chris and I had imagined rustic hidden villages that had languished intact, out of contact with the 20th century, until they were opened up by modern transportation, for this is what the media says about it. While this may be true to an extent (Monterossa was a Roman outpost two thousand years ago), they are all filled with recently built (by Italian standards), second-half of the 20th century, uniform apartment buildings. The buildings are much more interesting here in Levanto; the wild coast is the draw of the Cinque Terre.


The trains are packed. The locals (at least the ones not in business) seem put-out by us. Some give us dirty looks--if they don't ignore us altogether. There is a concerted effort by the Cinque Terre trade and development association to bring economic viability to this otherwise subsistence farming and fishing area through promotion; that is why we're here. We've been drawn here by what we've read about the unspoiled villages. But really, this is October, and the scene that we've encountered in a few places is reminiscent of the Spanish Steps, where every tourist in Rome seems to have gathered.