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.