Our first evening in Italy’s Cinque Terre ended in a local restaurant run by the Passini family which had opened especially for our tour group. Mama Passini gave us a pesto making demonstration complete with mortar and pestle right before dinner and then we were served her pesto lasagna that melted in our mouths, followed by swordfish with capers, topped off by a scrumptious semifreddo, which is the Italian version of ice cream cake. It was wonderful.
Their son Marco Passini, is a photographer of the Cinque Terre who sold us his calendars after dinner.
We made our way around Monterosso al Mare after dinner, poking our heads into the little souvenir shops and wandering through the ridiculously picturesque streets. Thank goodness I was able to get some retail therapy and buy a turquoise necklace in a shop that was stuffed to the rafters with goodies and was run by a charming Italian woman who called us all “nice ladies.”
The biggest challenge of the trip was waiting for us the next morning. As I mentioned before, Cinque Terre means “Five Lands” in Italian, and specifically means the five villages--Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore,which are connected by steep and winding paths. Five of us had decided to trek these paths and started off around ten o’clock in the morning.
We had been warned that the path between Monterosso and Vernazza was the steepest, but I don’t think I fully appreciated its difficulty (or my out-of-shapeness) until we had been climbing for about half an hour. But all our efforts were rewarded at every turn with the most spectacular views imaginable.
Approximately two and a half hours later, we five had reached Vernazza
and headed down through the little village for a well-earned lunch at a waterside café.
We made a not-so-secret pact to take the train from Vernazza to the fourth town,Manarola, and then walk on the last trail, the Via Amore, to Riomaggiore. At Riomaggiore, we caught the ferry back to Monterosso. We later found out that almost everyone on our tour who took the trails did the same thing we did, with the train-ferry combo to ensure survival. In our defense, it was awfully hot that day. And we did do the hardest trail.
That evening was the Feast of the Assumption and all the children in the village of Monterosso went to church and then went to the water’s edge and placed their “prayers” in the form of a candle on a little boat, out into the Ligurian Sea. After some time, their “prayers” floated way out into the water and the view of all those sparkling candles in the dark waters under a full moon was one of the most beautiful things you could ever imagine.
It seems somehow fitting that those prayer candles were our final memories of the Cinque Terre, a place so beautiful that it seems like Heaven on Earth. We lingered along the seaside path, watching those little lights dancing on the waves and knowing that no camera could ever truly capture the beauty of that sight. If there had been a way to cancel the rest of our tour and just stay for the next week in the Cinque Terre, I think many of us would have done it. It was gorgeous.
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