June 2003
This is the travel story that I held back and did not want to share with anyone because this place is filled with such magic I don't want others trampling around spoiling it for me when I go back in a few years. I refer to to the Ligurian Coast on the northwest of Italy, in the region known as Five Lands, 'Cinque Terre', a crafted ancient land of five towns spread out along a rocky shoreline of about 15 miles, where ancient terraced vineyards and olive groves hang onto steep cliffs running down to the Mediterranean sea.

We stayed for four days in an apartment in the main street in the first town, named Riomaggiore, north of the major port of La Spezia. This was an unspoilt town where real, everyday Italian life passed by, with only a sprinkling of tourists. The locals look from their window eeries to the street below and muse around the shops and alleyways, sometimes heading up to their kitchen gardens above the town for their evening vegetables. The spires of the Castel of Cerricu along with the Parish church dedicated to John the Baptist founded in 1340, dominate the skyline to the north. Due to a war and the SARS epidemic, if I can be so perverse to admit, there were not too many tourists. Those who were there seemed to coexist and blend in with the locals; even the German and Swiss hiking aficionados, yodeling and strutting out with their ski poles during the day, seemed to kick back and remain quiet.

Riomaggiore has the best little safe harbor imaginable, where the open fishing boats (small dinghies really) were lifted off the sea by a small crane. A walk around the cliff to the left gave one a magic view back over the town, clustered on the side of the hills with a ribbon of green terraces winding around the slopes above the town. At times you thought you were transported to east Bali and its steep rice terraces, such are the extent of the earthworks in Cinque Terre. How the locals work on those steep terraces taxes the imagination. Outside the rail station at Riomaggiore there is a large mural that depicts the unsung labors of humble village folk through history who built the eight million cubic meters (about 100 million cubic feet) of dry rock walls that form the amazing terraces of the Cinque Terre landscape.

Each night we bought our fresh seafood mix from the little delicatessen, along with some crusty bread, black olives and a small slab of fresh Parmesan cheese. A bottle or two or three of the smooth crisp white Cinque Terre wine made our bounty for the evening complete. This is the same wine that the Roman Caesars were known to imbibe upon for more than two millennia, and that the Etruscans before them drank and transported the wine in sheep bladders around the Mediterranean as far as Portugal in the west and Persia and Turkey in the east. In Boccaccio's Decameron, praise is given to the healing powers of a glass of Vernaccia wine from Corniglia, and Pope Paul 111 in the mid-1550s had little cases of red Monterosso wine sent to him in Rome for the occasion sip to the savior .

From Riomaggiore you can take a walk in the Cinque Terre National Park for a €6 day pass. This entitles you to second-class train rides between towns and electric bus rides in the towns, if you get too puffed or want to get higher. There are passes for 3 and 7 days, and for an extra charge for access to sea ferries between the towns. We followed the trail over the hills and along the seaside to the towns to the north. The next town is Manarola that can be seen from Riomaggiore, jutting out on a small promontory. This is a pretty town, smaller than Riomaggiore, and it is the site of the only youth hostel on the coast. I did not stay there but enquired and checked its facilities. It is a double-story elegant building, with a wide upstairs terrace looking over the town and the sea. It has 48 beds, 4 beds per room, and a bar, breakfast on demand and communications services such as fax, email and telephones for phone-cards. The cost of Ostello Cinque Terre is €20 a night. Check out the web site at www.cinqueterre.net/ostello. There is access by car, but the train is the go, with a brisk hike uphill to clear the cobweb. When you get there mountain bikes are ready to hire to tour the higher roads and non-hiking trails.

The next stop was my favourite place, Corniglia on a high steep outcrop. It is hard work getting up the hundreds of steep steps to the top, but once there you are in the quintessential comfort zone of an ancient Italian town, with small winding cobblestone streets crammed with atmosphere. In baskets out front of several stores are bottles of lemon, mandarin and peach fruit liqueur – 30% plus proof and meant to be used as a cordial with soda. A few of these in the heat of the day, and believe me Corniglia is home for the rest of the day and the night to follow. It looked like several hikers had given in to temptation over lunch; some ski poles of diehard hikers were strewn away in neglect.

We crept from the dark shadows of the inner sanctum of Corniglia and out into the misty heat of day to continue our trek to the town of Vernazza. The walk to Vernazza is through olive groves, with many trees with gnarled trunks wide in girth with very old age. Ever-present is the pleasant summer smell of crushed dry olive leaves on the track to also soften the foot. In this area there are local cork trees and indigenous Valerian bushes from which the bark yields a red sap that makes a sedative. Little bush birds, like chats, flit through the trees with busy cheeping noises and, one experiences a sort of dream-like sensation of being cosseted and drawn into the very arms of the unique landscape.

Vernazza is also cramped onto a long finger of gray striated rock jutting out to sea and was the most 'touristy' of all the towns we walked down into, with its perfect little harbor and seaside chapel and restaurants. We gave up the walk after a late lunch and caught the train to Monterosso al Mare, the largest and the furthermost north of the five towns. We then chose to be driven by the local bus around its environs, casting eyes back from high above the town over the deep blue Mediterranean, noticing that the town is divided into two sections with the major hotels in the northern end and the more atmospheric cluster of older buildings within the southern part. I liked this town the least, as it is closest to Genoa and has all the usual tourist traps and expensive pursuits that drive many a person mad and back into the hills.

The railway that links Riomaggiore and Monterosso is part of a line that connects Genoa to Pisa. The journey is an endless series of tunnels, so one experiences a lot of darkness on a journey punctuated with long glimpses of seascape and stops at the five towns grafted precariously on to the rocky landscape.

One evening we walked along the roughly hewn botanic garden track around from Riomaggiore, a sort of cliff-side palisade with terraces of plants known to be local to the area. At the end of the pathway we looked back across the darkening sea and took in the emergent twinkling of the lights of the five villages dotted along the shore. One is but a speck on this coast, but the five lands in sight of each at night are united as one with their individual glows, each individually unique and proud of one's own uniqueness. Together the towns are famous for their wines and their olive oil, but the tomatoes, beans, chicory and other fresh farm-grown produce is first rate as is the local seafood specialties of mussels, sardines, sea bass, octopus and cuttlefish.

I have decided to tell you this entire secret, but please keep it only to Bootsnall community travelers and go see it for yourself, but go gently into this land and do not rage into the dying of the light. It is a land for gentle contemplation and sitting back in a swing back chair and sipping on some feisty wine and crusty bread, leaving the world of madness and rush-hour domination well behind you. Promise me that?

Oh, Riomaggiore, how I long to see you again in a few years, as unchanged and timeless as I first saw you. Next time I will stay longer! Weeks longer.

I saw many lands and visited many monuments as testimony to days of yore on this Art Pilgrimage in Europe. The art of Cinque Terre is a unique mixture of man-made and natural, the blend where man has treated the landscape with such care to weave nature into a productive yet unblemished land. Man has also taken on the task of preserving the past labors by rebuilding terrace walls in decline.

I never felt safer, more content than on these warm days looking across dramatic hills and sea. Life in my Great South Land (the land of OZ) will never be the same as I dream and yearn in part for the next sight of your fairytale shores.

Written from Riomaggiore on May 13 on a scrap of paper but withheld until I returned to Australia. Released as top secret – BootsnAll eyes only!.

Questions?
If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our Europe Insiders page.