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Cinque Terre After leaving Sienna and Chad in Marseille, we trained southeastward past the glitz of the Côte d'Azur and came to rest in Italy's wonderful Cinque Terre.

cliffside Côte d'Azur housing	Monaco's harbor
Five sister towns, Monterossa, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore, cling to the steep Ligurian coast, each about four kilometers from the last, to make up the Cinque Terre -- literally, "five lands". "Terre" is a very basic and resonant idea among the original olive- and wine-grape-growing inhabitants, and they could not give their land a more loving or respectful designation.	view from our first "house"

west -- the 5 Cinque Terre villages -- railway black; paths white and yellow -- east

Vernazza from the Belforte tower

Vernazza from the breakwater

Lapping at the feet of four of them, the Ligurian sea is as moody as any ocean, now flat, blue, and lake-like, but just last night, when a little storm blew through, it was grey and choppy. Every store has a favorite picture of waves breaking mightily over the breakwater. The towns have been connected by a trail from a time when pirates ranged the coast. From where I sit, Vernazza's watchtower, called Belforte, or "loud cry," bristles with tourists where once townsmen scanned for unfriendly ships bearing down on the town.

Since the 1920s, the towns have also been linked by a railroad mainline extending from Naples and Rome around the Mediterranean coast to Nice and Marseilles. Between goods trains and passenger expresses, hourly commuter trains rattle through, collecting and depositing students, locals, and hoardes of daytrippers and longer stay visitors like ourselves.

Vernazza railway station

For decades the Cinque Terre have been a vacation destination for Germans and Austrians who are cut off from the Mediterranean only by this narrow strip of Italy. It takes four hours to get here from Innsbruck, five from Munich, and so the number of German tourists, particularly over the weekend, is high, perhaps a majority. This is also a favorite spot for "flatland" Italians from teeming Milan and environs. These "unspoiled" towns offer a promise of intimacy and naturalness that has apparently been overwhelmed elsewhere by commerce and industry. Recently, a third group has discovered these "authentic Italian towns" -- American "Rick Steves travelers," who stagger in, beige-and-brown books in hand, looking for a bit of old Italy. The Germans and Italians typically day trip in, staying in flossier resorts up and down the coast, but we Steves-ites come for a few days. At the railroad station and in the harbor square, benches of black-outfitted Vernazza ladies gather and judge the incoming tourists: "Those are just day-trippers, you can tell because they are speaking German so loudly, but look, Gina, that couple, the panicky ones with the backpacks and money-belts, they have that tell-tale Steves look. They know they should have arrived this morning, but here they are, and it's your turn..."

The hoardes that descend on these pretty towns even in the "shoulder season" of the last day of September are amazing. This town, and her sisters, inhale mobs each morning and breathe them out again as the sun goes down at night. Considering the size of these towns -- perhaps averaging 2,000 residents each -- their ability to absorb tourists without becoming saturated and sour is astonishing. If a dozen trains arrive and depart from each direction, exchanging 50 passengers each time, and the tourist boat arrives and departs half a dozen times a day, exchanging another 25 visitors each stop, and each hour a further 75 people walk in and out via the trails, as many as 4,000 people pass through this town every day, day in, day out. Each resident carries the unsustainable weight of 250 to 400 visitors annually whether they like it or not. Some residents make the best of this; others are merely resigned to it as they are to the onset of winter: day-tripping tourists are like summer downpours. At least it only sprinkles at night! Yesterday, Saturday, the town was completely over-run, and we sought out-of-the-way corners --- the keep below the watch-tower, a quiet bench in a corner of the boat-strewn harbor square --- and watched the world go by. There was a wedding in the early afternoon, a slender, elegantly dressed young Italian couple, heralded by joyous pealing of the church bells. In the late afternoon it clouded up, and the cats moved restlessly from boat to boat seeking warmth and shelter. One desperate fellow actually curled up and slept in my lap for awhile before I rousted him.

a wedding in Vernazza

After three interesting days in a tiny back bedroom as paying houseguests of a native couple, Alfeo and Gina, we moved to the top of a narrow house partway up the path to Corniglia where we have a great view, and a room and terrace to ourselves. We may by this act have demoted ourselves from family status to the position of tourists, but having an Italian father and mother looking over our shoulders, and sharing their dark existence, didn't open us to this fine little town the way we wanted. Alfeo and Gina have learned to use the tide of homeless tourists as a source of comfortable income, at the summertime cost of their own domestic privacy. Theirs is, I expect a fairly typical pattern.

Alfeo, a crusty and opinionated retired train driver, escapes every morning but Sunday to La Spezia "to buy fish" --- he probably has a free lifetime train pass, because there are surely fish to be had in Vernazza --- while sweet Gina stays mostly in their dark apartment, venturing out only in the afternoon when it is necessary to recruit new tenants to share their flat.

east from Vernazza toward Riomaggiore

Riomaggiore

On our first full day here, we took the train to Riomaggiore, the southeasternmost of the five villages, and walked back along the easy trail to Corniglia, the middle village and the only one that doesn't look to the ocean for its well-being. Instead, it sits astride the outer of two roads that follow the coast. What a wonderful chance to get a feel for the "terre"! Each of the five villages has a distinctive character.

The nearly total absence of cars in three of the towns (Vernazza, Manorolo, and Riomaggiore) is a blessing. The innermost, the autostrada, here runs behind the mountains, and is therefore out of sight and mind for us here on the coast, but the outer road winds and dips along the ocean face of the hills, dropping briefly into Corniglia and turning it into a parking lot.

Corniglia: note the zigzag stairway

Corniglia "street"

Away from the road, Corniglia's narrow streets and tiny squares are as charming as the other villages, but the whole town seems to be subject to a sense of carnival transcience that's lacking in the car-free villages despite the traffic of day-trippers and visitors that wash through every day. Is it reasonable to infer that a large factor in the tolerance and carrying capacity of these villages is that visitors and residents are moving at human speeds, and carrying with them only their own baggage, not the smelly, shiny added weight of infernal combustion? Human relations are not constantly severed by whizzing metal, and so even visitors can participate in the continuing sense of community.

The whole region has recently been declared a national park, but there's surprisingly little "nature" left here. One park trail sign explains that the land has been worked continuously for millennia, and so nature is confined to recovering "maquis" and terminally damaged "garrigue." Little or no effort is being made to restore ecosystems, as the land is too "valuable." The price is paid for this by the sea below, which is strikingly devoid of life. Apparently, it takes a seashore to make a sea.

one of the few bits of "wild"

Two crops power the Cinque Terre economy, grapes and tourists. The grape harvest is just in, now in late September, and many of the narrow streets and passages reek of crush and first fermentation. Likewise, we are among the last crush of tourists; in a couple of weeks, many of the seasonal stores will close, the residents will get their towns back, and the vineyard workers will begin their fallow season pruning and preparation for next season.

I am constantly considering the tension between development and sustainability ...as, I am sure, are the directors of the commune that governs Vernazza, and their regional overseers, and the Italian agency "of the Ambient" -- the European word for environment -- that has declared these five villages, and the peninsula of Portofino, and a few other touristic "treasures," as National Parks. Except for the fact that visitors must pay 5,000 lira (about $2.50) to walk on the "Via d'Amor" trail between Riomaggiore and Manarola and little busses and a station wagon (including one electric vehicle; more are planned) for carrying folks back and forth between parking lots high above the villages and downtown, there is very little evidence that this declaration is preserving anything. The evidence is probably negative: what we do NOT see here -- high-rise chain hotels, franchise marketing of any kind. Alfeo taps his finger beneath one eye in a classic Ligurian gesture that says "I know what's going on: someone in the government is using our popularity to enrich himself!"

	Vernazza and eastward from Belforte

Village life centers around the piazza at the foot of the town and in front of the church. Tourists breakfast here in the mornings, fishermen keep their boats here. Depending on sun and wind, the village's many cats curl up on boat covers, on a step, roof, or in the lee of a column. Cats and people live parallel lives here; there are lots of both, but there is little interaction. Italian cats appear to prefer it that way, much to the disappointment of American tourists who try to befriend them.

Michael finds a kindred spirit photo credit: Rochelle Elkan

vertical neighborhoods

Opposite our ridge-top terrace, the sciuiu (literally, flowery) sunny side of the town presents a cliff-like face of windows and balconies. Count the satellite dishes, and you can guess how many apartments are rented out. Below us, the livegu (dank) shadow side is cooler in summer and late afternoon.

In this steep valley, with pastel buildings on both sides making the valley seem even steeper, I am three floors above our entry when I take the photograph above, and about seven floors above the main street only one row of houses north of me. The main street runs along the bottom of a valley that pitches steeply down to the sea, and so our room and patio are about thirteen floors above the harbor square barely 100 meters west. Across the valley a scant 50 meters, I can tell which balconies and rooms are lived in by Vernazzans and which -- barer, trimmer -- are let to visitors; eight of thirteen lack evidences of permanency. When this town's tourism shuts down at the end of October, how empty it must be! As I'm sure you can tell, we fell in love with the Cinque Terre. We stayed here for a week, and enjoyed every minute. I took too many pictures, and have too many thoughts, for a single page, and so you'll have to follow along to the second Cinque Terre page if you want to hear about the walk to Monterosso and the Virgin's Chapel.

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