This is a continuation to the big Cinque Terre post I made. We just did so much! Day 2 of our Cinque Terre trip went much smoother than day 1. We learned a few things and we were able to go around to four out of the five towns of Cinque Terre.
We started out the day at the Hotel Paese Corvara where we walked to the night before. We had breakfast there and it was good. There was a group of about 10 serious motorbikers there eating breakfast in their leather racing gear. I didnt know what they were saying but the loud sounds they made when they described things were pretty funny. After breakfast ,we talked with the hotel lady about getting out of Corvara and to La Spezia where we could take the train to Cinque Terre. The bus service didn't run on sunday and a cab was going to be around 80 euro. Then the lady called her husband and she got her husband to drive us to La Spezia for 25 euro. We were very grateful and we thanked the lady for being so kind. While waiting for the guy to get here to pick us up, I decided to walk around Corvara a little and take some photos...
Thats Hotel Paese Corvara.
What a view!
Stone steps going between houses.
The ride from Corvara to Spezia was nice. The lady's husband spoke almost no english so we got to practice our italian a little bit with him. We realized that we walked a long way last night to get to the hotel. It was about a ten minute drive from Corvara to Ricco.
Yesterday while on the train back to Spezia, we saw that some people had these Cinque Terre cards that let them ride the train as many times as they would like for one day between the towns of Cinque Terre. For 12 euros per card, Ali and I thought that they would be smart investments.
While on the train, Ali showed me this card she got from the hotel with a map showing where Corvara is. As you can see, it is a little far from La Spezia and a bit far from Cinque Terre. You can even see Ricco on the map. I still cant believe we walked that road!
The town we decided to go to first today is called Vernazza. Ali wanted to go to this one and as the day went by and I saw more of the towns, Vernazza quickly became my favorite. Vernazza was pretty busy today.
The view from Vernazza's harbor. You can see the train tunnel in the right of the the photo.
Vernazza is like no city I have ever seen before. Buildings are stacked on top of each other and brightly colored and I only saw one small three wheeler pickup vehicle when I was there and it was used as a trash truck.
Ali on a Vernazza "Street"
Since there really aren't any cars in Vernazza, the streets are like alleyways and even stairways! We saw street signs on intersections of staircases! I would say Vernazza isn't just a walking city, its a climbing city. Way cool!
We climbed up this long dirt path that connected the small houses on the outside of the city that were the farmers houses who had the farms and gardens on the terraced mountainside. This path also connected Vernazza to the other cities. You can actually hike between the cities and if Ali and I had a bit more time we probably would hike to all of them. Vernazza is a beautiful town, it seemed like everywhere you looked there was another beautiful landscape, weather it was a big terraced mountain jutting out into the ocean, some sailboats, a colorful city or just a beach, it was all there!
I caught the train moving through the mountain like a snake moving through tunnels.
Having fun in Cinque Terre!
While we were enjoying the view up on the narrow pathway we met some other kids studying abroad in Switzerland. One of them was from Frederick Maryland and even knew about Pitcrew skate shop! Small world sometimes. They said the trains in Switzerland are always on time to the second and you can even set your clock to them they are so precise. I wanna go to Switzerland. they offered to take our picture together.
After hanging out a bit more and eating a small snack, we decided to leave Vernazza and head one town south to Corniglia. We hopped on the train with our Cinque Terre passes and off we went!
When we got to Corniglia we saw immediately that Corniglia is a little different from the other towns in that it is not directly on the water but rather it is on top of a mountain on the water. This means we have to climb A LOT of stairs to get there! They just kept going and going and going!
We stopped for a little bit to take photos. Yes, the train station does have an amazing ocean front view.
At Corniglia. Corniglia had lots of gardens. Perhaps more so than some of the other towns. Corniglia wasn't so densely populated so people could have gardens in their backyards.
I caught this flower in bloom and thought it was really pretty.
We really didn't stay too long at Corniglia. There just didn't seem to be as much to do and we still wanted to see another town and eat dinner in Vernazza and also get back to Florence at a decent time so instead of waiting two hours for the next train (they were going on lunch break) we decided to take the one that was in about a half hour. I had enough time to go to the bathroom and Ali pet a cat she found and then we scurried on down all the stairs and right on over to the train. We were right on time for the train.
From Corniglia, we went to Manarola. You had to walk through a tunnel that went through a mountain to get to Monarola. Ali has some special memories from when she went to Monarola with her family a few years ago. She went one day in August and on the day she went there was a huge annual water fight in the entire town. She remembers there being signs as they were going through this tunnel explaining to everyone that there is a giant waterfight happening all over town and if you didn't want to get wet to turn back now. Ali and her family wanted to get wet and they sure did. Ali said there were people all over town with super soakers, water balloons and buckets of water having one giant water fight! It sounded amazing!
When we got here, Ali says she remembers people on all of these windows dumping buckets of water on the people below and there were water balloons flying everywhere. For 1 day out of the year the whole town erupts into this huge waterfight and she was lucky enough to be right in the middle of it!
After walking a bit further to the water we stumbled upon this! People swim and sit on the rocks in the area where they put the boats in and take the boats out of the water. They have a big crane that raises and lowers them. It looked like an awesome place to swim. seeing as how we already had our bathing suits on, we decided to grab some gelato really quick and go for a swim!
The view sitting down and eating gelato. You can see some boats that didn't get put in the water this year.
Jumping right on in!
The water cooled you right off. It was also really salty!
It was fun to climb onto rocks and jump off of them.
After swimming we decided to head back to Vernazza to explore a bit more before dinner. The Cinque Terre card was really nice to have. It is really nice to have unlimited train usage. A Euro pass is sounding really, really, nice and is something we want to get.
While walking in Vernazza, we found this little cave entryway right in the middle of the city. There was a little fence with some signs in Italian saying something about pets and trash or something and then right off the road there was this. Ali and I decided to check it out......
it seems like lots of other people decided to check it out as well.
Thats the cave/passageway from the other side.
The cave led to a beach on the other side of the island. Way cool! Vernazza even has a beach. All the beaches in Cinque Terre have little rocks instead of sand. The water also drops off really fast and you cant really walk way out into the water. This beach was still really cool though and there weren't really any shops or anything around it. It was like a secret beach. We talked to some classmates after we got back to school and apparently Cinque Terre has several secret beaches. One girl said her italian friend took her through a pitch black abandoned train tunnel to get to one hidden beach and it was a secret nude beach. Pretty wild!
We explored and climbed the city a little more. Here is an example of a Vernazza street. That plaque that you see on the wall that says, "Via S. Giov. Battista" is a typical italian street sign and these stairways would be Vernazza "streets". Climbing city!
As we were climbing up the stairs and exploring we found this "Castello Doria". It was basically like a lookout point and it looks very old. I circled it in red in this photo......
It was about 1. 50 Euro to get in and they were doing some construction and restoration on part of it. To get to the top, you go up this super narrow spiral staircase. It definitely was not meant for many people to go up and it was tough when several young american ladies decided they had to go down as we were about halfway up. You really had to wait for people to finish coming up or down to get by, but these ladies where determined and squeezed by.
The view from the top was AMAZING! I took so many photos and we probably spent about a half hour up there just looking around. You could see everything and I felt that I couldn't fit everything into the viewfinder of my camera. There was just so much to see and it was 360 degrees of beautiful scenery. I could easily spend a few hours up there just watching the city move as you could just see so much! It would be really fun to sit up there with a chair and draw some.
There were lots of boats. It would be so cool to own a boat here as you could travel to all the islands and go fishing (Cinque Terre were originally fishing towns) and even sail to other parts of the Mediterranean. How much do you think it would cost to own a small house in one of these towns and a boat!? I almost wanted to stop by a real estate office near one of the train stations and see. We wondered a similar question about houses with rooftop terraces near Florence's Duomo. Our italian teacher Metilda said that most italians prefer to own and not rent or lease their houses and usually when they own them, the houses are passed down from generation to generation. They are almost never sold.
If you look closely you can see that many houses have rooftop terraces. Every amount of space is used and rooftop terraces seem very common in Italy. I really want to find someone with one in Florence and eat dinner on top of one.
The mountains are big. You can see some of the farm houses on this one and the terraced farms. You can also see the train tunnel towards the bottom of the mountain. You can see a lot up here.
Ali had a red filter that she was using with her black and white film camera to get some unique effects with the blues in the sky and water. I wanted to see how it looked on my camera.
It was really neat up there. Eventually we started to get hungry and we decided to head back down and get some dinner.
We ate at a small restaurant with outdoor street side seating. It seemed really hard to not eat at a touristy restaurant in Vernazza as it seemed like they were everywhere. Maybe we would have to do some more searching but we wanted to sit down and have something nice so we ate at the, "Anitca Osteria Il Baretto". Osterias are restaurants that are supposed to serve, "cucina typica" or typical food of the region and they are supposed to be not too expensive. With the large amount of tourism in many areas, "cucina typica" is often skewed a bit and they aren't exactly cheap. Nevertheless, the food was still good.
We waited a bit longer at the restaurant than we probably should have but it was alright. For the trip back to Florence, we caught the train back to La Spezia (for free with our Cinque Terre card), then from La Spezia we headed to Pisa (a major train and plane and travel hub) and from Pisa we rode the nicest train I have ever ridden on back to Florence Santa Maria Novella station. The train to Florence was small and very new. the design on the inside reminded me a little bit of some sort of Star Trek spaceship as there were many different options for seating and LED screens on the walls to show you where the next stop was, the time, the temperature and other info. We made it back to Florence around midnight and headed to bed for classes the next morning. All in all, it was a great trip and quite the adventure! Cinque Terre is awesome!
