Perched on promontories along the ‘Italian Riviera,’ between Pisa and Genoa, Cinque Terre is a string of coastal villages that will capture your heart forever. Up to relatively recently these villages, situated within a national park, were off the beaten track for tourists. We hadn’t heard of this area up to a few years ago, despite having visited Italy several times. However, having watched an episode of Rick Steves’ Europe video series, we just had to visit.
In June 2019, we arrived by train from Assisi, with La Spezia as our entry point. The rail network in Italy is amazing and it offers a viable alternative to motoring to get around. In La Spezia, we caught the Cinque Terre Express which takes the breathtaking cliff-side journey between La Spezia and Levanto, every 30 minutes, stopping in all five Cinque Terre villages along the way (Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso).
The first thing we noticed on boarding the Express at about 5:00 pm was that each carriage was packed to capacity 10 minutes before the scheduled departure time. We were going as far as the fourth stop (Vernazza), where a room in a private house, close to the train station, was going to be our base for two nights.
Once we got off the train and walked up the hill towards our accommodation, we were already in a different world. We felt the peace of the late afternoon (perhaps many were still on siesta) and we could slow our pace again. We were very happy with our accommodation (nice hosts, nice house, nice room), and we decided to spend the first evening in Vernazza, having spent much of the day on trains.
Next day, we set out early and bought a day pass that allowed us unlimited travel on the Cinque Terre Express and gave us access to the trails in the national park. We explored Levanto, Corniglia, Manarola and Monterosso, in that order, before flopping into bed exhausted that evening.
A few highlights of that memorable day are conveyed in the photos below – featuring the villages we visited.
Levanto
Corniglia
Manarola
Monterosso
After this introduction to the region, Manarola is definitely the village we would go back to in a heartbeat. The photo below, taken outside the Cappun Magru restaurant captures the essence of this village for us: blue sky, quaint architecture, animated life on the square.
When we asked at the restaurant what the village is like in the winter, we were told that many visitors come in December and January for the very popular Nativity Festival. Visiting at that time of year is now on our bucket list. We might even sneak in a visit to the supposedly uncrowded, yet picturesque, Portovenere on that trip.
As John’s mother used to say, “It is very important to have something to look forward to.”
(This is a revised version of a post originally published on John’s old blog.)