Italy Bound - Cinque Terra - part 1

  

This blog is composed of excerpts from a hand-written journal that I kept during a recent trip to Italy with my husband and 4 very dear friends.  I have combined these excerpts with photos of this trip.

Thursday, September 8, 12:25, on the train to La Spezia  

We are finally on the train from Rome Terminal (the main Rome train station) to La Spezia.  From there one more train to get to Monterosso, one of the ‘5 Lands’  of Cinqua Terra, where we are staying for 5 nights.  It will be good to get there and get some rest.  This has been a hard day.  After flying about 8 hours overnight, we landed at the Rome airport.  From there we took the Leonardo Express train from the airport to the Rome train station (the Termini). 

First it took a long time for our bags to come out on the carousel.  The bags are WAY too heavy!  Should have taken the smaller suitcases.  Then we, and a lot of other people, got on the train.  And a very hot and stuffy train it was.  Then we all just sat there chatting.  There was no movement and no ventilation for maybe a half hour.  Trains on either side of us came and went.  No train personnel  were ever seen. 

Finally an announcement was made in Italian.  Even the young Italian pilot we sat next to could not hear it well enough to understand it.  But people started getting up and leaving the train and boarding another one.  So we followed along.

Finally made it to Termini – a very confusing place.  After flailing around on the track for probably 15 minutes (dragging too – heavy suitcases along), Lisa asked a man in a kiosk.  The walkway to the main part of the station was not very evident.  Once we got to the place to buy the tickets to Cinque Terre, there was a long line and one poor girl in the only ticket window open.  The train to La Spezia left at 1210, and the hour or so was spent running around finding cash and bathrooms. 

This train is traveling along the western coast of Italy.  The things we notice out the window:  St Peter’s dome  zooms by, lots of laundry hanging to dry outside of windows, and lots of graffiti!!   We get periodic flashes of the blue blue Mediterranean – all in all a really pretty ride. 

One more small train from La Spezia to Monterosso and we are there!  We are in a small apartment about a half block from the beach and on the 4^th floor!!!!  No elevator.  Actually there were no escalators in the train stations either – so be prepared to lug your suitcases up and down stairs – lots of them – if you come here.  Very heavy suitcases indeed!!!

Friday September 9

This is a beautiful place.  And it seems like everyone in the world agrees because they are all here with us.  In a way this place seems like an Italian Disney world.  Very different from the towns we saw from the train windows between Rome and La Spezia.  Much more cleaned up and polished for the tourists. 

All of the businesses are geared for tourists – restaurants (lots of restaurants) , small groceries with pretty fruits displayed outside, and gelato stands, lots of gelato!!.  

Monterosso is part beach town, part mountain village with clean laundry hanging from so many windows. 

Day one in Cinque Terre: We exited the little train that runs between towns in Riomaggiore , the southern most of the 5, walked through a dark tunnel, beautifully decorated with tile mosaics, and emerged into a sparkling small mountain village; pastel houses, steep, narrow main street leading up the mountain. 

 The ‘oohs’ and ‘aaahs’ remind me of the impression that Main Street in Disney World makes when you first get through the turnstiles. 

Whoever had this idea to market these 5 small fishing villages as ‘Cinque Terre’ was a marketing genius.  Connected by footpaths, train and ferry, they became a vacation wonderland and probably lifted the hard working weather-beaten people out of poverty too. 

 In Riomaggiore there are beautiful murals in several places immortalizing the faces of these people.

We, of course, had to conquer the steep main street and walked almost to the top. 

Walking down, we took some smaller side streets with lots of steep steps. 

On one side street we came upon two stone layers building a stone wall along a terraced vineyard that was high off the road.  They were hefting large boulders at street level  where they had been dumped and slowly trudging up a foot path to the wall with the large rock on their shoulders.   

 There they were building the wall as their ancestors had done for many generations.  The only difference probably is that a truck had dumped the stone there at the roadside.  This is a small glimpse into the extreme effort needed over the centuries to construct these buildings and terraces into the rock faces of the mountains. 

The use of vertical space is interesting and ingenious.  Every garage roof holds a small vineyard. 

Every patio is topped with a kiwi vine.  Stairs are everywhere.  The side walls of buildings show their history where the wall was expanded upward and a new ‘house’ built on top of the old one.  The streets pitch up at a steep angle.  We saw local older women in dresses and sandals (not hiking boots like us) on their stockinged feet slowly making their way up or down the inclines, stopping to chat with friends bending to peer under the window shutters.