Lost in Italy: Hiking the Cinque Terre

You look at the pictures, you read the words of other visitors, you think you know what to expect, but somehow I wasn't fully prepared for how beautiful the Cinque Terre were going to be as we hiked from Monterosso to Riomaggiore.

We started kind of late this morning, I guess we were tired from the excitement of the Palio, or maybe it was that we really just didn't sleep well on account of the crappy pillows, but it didn't really matter. The sun drifted in and out of the clouds making it a really beautiful day to hike along the cliffs.

Cinque Terre is laced with well marked and well trodden paths some take you high up along the ridge line and others lead you along the coast. The trail we chose is probably the most famous of the Cinque Terre paths, it is the Sentiero no. 2 or Sentiero Azzuro. About 11 kilometers long, it takes just around 5 hours to walk the entire thing. The trail winds its way up and down the swells of the coast connecting each of the five villages in the Cinque Terre: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore. According to the map we received at the trail entrance (5 euros a person to hike the entire trail), the total change in elevation difference is 500 meters between the highest and lowest points of the trail.

The first bit is pretty steep and seems to be the most rugged, but that didn't stop the parade of women in high heeled shoes, older couples chatting away in Italian, backpackers from Australia and the UK chatting away the afternoon, families with children that couldn't possibly have been over the age of 3 from traipsing along the narrow path that edges the sheer cliffs. Truthfully with the steep drops on one side I don't think I would have been brave enough to bring kids that young on this walk.

It was amazing looking down on one side at the sheer cliffs, they just seemed to drop straight to crashing waves and hazy, cerulean waters. On the other side I kept finding the source of the faint lemon air that kept teasing me, row upon row of lemon trees, bursting with bright pale yellow fruits, almost the color of the sun that kept slipping behind the clouds. A little while later and we were walking along rows of grape vines or olive trees. And stretched between these pastoral pursuits were the villages. Pastel postcards nestled along the cliffs, some perched on top of a bluff, some cozied into the bays created by the water.

The beaches were few and far between in these villages, mostly they were rock beaches where you could see people sunning themselves on boulders, occasionally taking a moment to plunge into the water to cool off. Tourists sunbathing aside, when we got away from the town squares it was so easy to imagine what it must have been like when the only way to get from village to village was to walk along these footpaths. People still live in tiny houses amongst the groves that must have been there for many, many years and while they are now mostly connected by roads, they still walk the paths between the villages.

By the time we got to Riomaggiore, which was by far the most touristy feeling village of them all, we were pretty tired so we decided to take the train back. In less than 20 minutes we covered what had taken us more than 5 hours to walk. But it was ok, it was a lovely gorgeous day and a beautiful walk along the ocean.