Fourth Day in Italy - Cinque Terre

We left Florence to go to Cinque Terre, which is an area of five small seaside towns in northwest Italy. We trained to La Spezia, the main town close by, and then we took a bus from their to our hostel and our hostel to the trains to go to the towns. Needless to say, there was a lot of waiting involved.

We stayed in Biassa, a small town just before the coast. Women on a city bus were very helpful about getting us to what I think was the only hostel in the town. We got off where we were told to get off and started walking. I realized we had walked a bit too far, and just down the road a woman who had helped us on the bus was also yelling, « Go back! You’ve gone too far! » Her husband, who was also home for lunch, was motioning with her. When we figured it out, they smiled and waved before heading inside.

We dropped things off in the nicest hostel we’ve stayed in (it had a lift) and headed to catch the train. The day was beautiful. While waiting for a bus to get to the train, we laid out on some stairs and tried to read some, but the warmth and the sun pretty much forced us to just soak it in without doing much else. The neighbor who helped us had a dog, and he came over and kept us company for while as we waited. European dogs are – from what I’ve seen – all very well trained. He came when we called, and he tried to nestle his way into our laps immediately.

The towns that comprise Cinque Terre proper were even smaller than where we were staying. The local bus has permission to go in and out, but for the most part there was very limited car access. Roads were steep, windy and narrow. Gardens were terraces, and shops and houses were slammed together for support. There is an old train line that runs through the towns, which we took. But there is also a national park that you can walk to do all of them. If we had been there for more than an afternoon, I would have loved to walk the 6-hour trail. The beaches were stony with grey sand and rocks, and the towns were set above the beaches on steep, rocky cliffs. It made for a beautiful place. As we wandered and trained from town to town, we stopped in for a delicious seafood lunch with swordfish, octopus, mussels, cod and some other regional fare. It was delicious and we could taste the sea.

As with most things in rural Italy, the towns and their shops closed down by about 7 pm. We found some fruit and snacks for dinner and had a quiet night at the hostel. I did my first load of sink laundry, and since my packing consultants insisted I shouldn’t bring detergent I used my Italian shampoo to try to make things not as clean. I pulled out my clothesline and hung things all over the room, hoping that despite the seaside humidity the clothes (including jeans and lycra) would dry by early the next morning when we had to leave. I was wrong and schlepped around wet clothes in my luggage for a day and a half before finding a laundrymat in Venice.