Le Cinque terre

Leaving the Poets’ Gulf the coast becomes harder and rougher, as it wants to guard a treasure. The five villages closed between Punta Montenero to Punta Mesco seem to be the most valid reason.
The Cinque terre, national Park since 1999 and UNESCO Heritage (with Lerici, Portovenere and the Islands Palmaria, Tino and Tinetto) since 1997 welcome you with their ancient charm, made of simple tastes, of clear skies, of seas not always clement, bewitching the visitor that, spellbound, observes the rapid tangles of roads and stairways, in a dimension more vertical than horizontal.

Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso need time to make themselves discover; the waiting time of a train, still the best means to move in these places, the time of a walk along the "Blue Path" that connects all of them, the time of a standstill among the terraces where vineyards grow, to taste the wine Five Earths DOC or, with some fortune, the rare and delicious "Sciacchetrà", a “passito” wine obtained only by local grapes.

A break in the Cinque Terre cannot set aside from the visit of their hinterland. Behind every village a sanctuary rises, that tells us of popular traditions dating back to the ancient times and it brings us to the time in which the pilgrims of the Street Francigena, that from Santiago of Composed in Galicia went to Rome, crossing these valleys and finding shelter in the several "hospitalia" of the territory. From the village of Monterosso you can reach, through a road in the shade of pines, holm-oaks and chestnut trees, the Sanctuary of Soviore, considered the most ancient Marian Sanctuary in Liguria, and from here the so-called "Street of the Sanctuaries" connecting it to the following ones.

Leaving at your shoulders "the faint and pulsing motion from the sea" so well described by Eugenio Montale who spent his holidays here in Monterosso, introduce you to an hinterland made of hills covered with chestnut trees, by ancient suburbs with a curious circular form: that’s how the Vara valley shown itself, crossed by a river tributary of Magra, that typically represents a vivacious counterpart to the classical image of a “bathing” Liguria