cinque terre

Our second day in Italy. We headed off that morning with boat passes in hand and hopped from one town to the next in search of dead ends, windy stair cases, and memorable food.

The area is known for its marble quarries because of the many different color combinations they have locally. While I didn't knowingly see any architecture or interior decoration from those quarries, we got to enjoy it anyway. The water breaks all along the Cinque Terre are boulders of marble and made me feel as though I were some small creature among the pebbles of a rock beach like the ones we have in the Puget Sound, filled with brightly colored stones. The only difference was that they were bigger than I was rather than small enough to fit ten in the palm of my hand.

The little towns are so old that the buildings are stacked together with tiny passageways between. extensions being built on. They're all in different colors as well, but because they're all in oranges, golds, and brick reds but for the occasional water blue one, they maintain a jumbled uniformity.

While the Cinque Terre now survive on tourism, they were once working villages. Their streets still thread down to the water. It's quite wonderful, especially for someone like me who has very little sense of direction. The cup shape of the valleys that hold them against the water make it so that all one need to is walk down hill in order to reach the harbor. 

We found this wonderful perch in which to sip a cup of tea and eat some biscuits before heading back to Monterosso and getting a good night's rest before heading off to our next destination, Venice.

[photo credit: jr]