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Cinque Terre, Italy
I got me a shovel and I'm digging a ditch, and I'm gonna fight for this four square feet of land like a mean old son of a bitch
I have been to Italy before but I had never been to the Cinque Terre, the Five Lands, the picture perfect stretch of the Italian Mediterranean coast connected by hiking trails and trains, a place that truly needs to be seen to be believed.
I stayed two nights so that I had one full day to explore the five different towns and hike between them. Luckily the weather was good but warm, so with my pass in hand (it is an Italian National Park), I set out from my serviceable hotel in the new section of Monterosso al Mare and headed south towards Vernazza and future glory. Unfortunately the offline map from the app I was using sent me on a way that was unnecessarily difficult to start. The four sections of the main coastal Cinque Terre trail start with the most difficult section between Monterosso al Mare and Vernazza, then get increasingly easier as you go along. I thought that starting with the most difficult section was a good idea, until I got about halfway up that most difficult section. From the path and direction I took, it was an almost endless stair of high, irregular stone steps that rose straight through the vineyards. Sure it was pretty, but by the time I got myself back to the normal sections of the coastal trail, I had really felt all of those steps more than I expected. In Vernazza, sitting by its perfect harbor and watching the boats and tourists come and go, it started to seem to be a good idea to hop a train to the next town instead. That doesn't mean that I didn't keep walking- my watch put me at thirteen and a half miles and a totally realistic elevation gain of 132 stories that day- but the thought of walking up another stretch of endless vineyard steps was something which I decided to take a pass on.
There are five lands in the Cinque Terre and five pictures in each of these emails, so it only seems fair that I give you a picture and a short explanation from each of them. We'll start where I started in Monterosso al Mare, where the strong morning sun still wasn't enough to bring anyone down to the beach.
This is an obviously constructed picture. It's a combination of ten different individual pictures (taken with my Sony RX-100 M4 hand held point and shoot in portrait mode) assembled using a German stitching program called Autopano Giga. And while the photo may be obviously constructed, the view is real. This is from the top of the lookout tower at Castello Doria, on the top of the hill in Vernazza, with a view back towards the coast and the towns and the vineyards that remains close to perfect.
So I took the train from Vernazza to Corniglia to avoid a section of trail that was still described as difficult but easier than the one I had taken. But even from the train station, the trip isn't easy. Just to get up to the town there are 382 steps up 33 switchbacks- all that just to see views like this.
Manarola was pretty impressive, with a small busy town and an uphill street that led to a vineyard path and views like this. The path also then led down some steep switchbacks down to the harbor, except that it was closed from recent storm damage. This is a bit of a thing in the Five Lands, as the coastal trail from Corniglia all the way to Riomaggiore was also a victim of that pesky storm, meaning that while all of those difficult, steep vineyard steps were fine, the easier sections of the trail were all closed.
The last of the towns and the last of the Cinque Terre pictures is from Riomaggiore, where if you keep walking downhill enough from the train station, you'll be able to look back on views of the harbor just like this one.
