Italy Part 2 - Cinque Terre

  
Day 3: Travel Day!
Our third day in Italy saw us traveling from the East coast of Italy on the end of the Adriatic Sea to the West coast and the Ligurian Sea. Destination: Cinque Terre! This journey was a 4-5 hour drive. We only made two stops, including one at a rest stop / gas station (packed with British cheerleaders jabbering on in thick accents as they headed to an international competition!), and one to take a picture of clouds rolling over the Appenine mountains as we passed through (and call our next housing contact via payphone, which thankfully we learned how to use in Venice).

For our time in the Cinque Terre region we stayed in Levanto, which is a medium-sized town just north of the five villages in the Cinque Terre chain (see map above). Once we left the main highway, we wound our way down from the Appenine Mountains to the Ligurian Coast along very twisty and narrow roads. We finally reached the center circle in Levanto where we met the owner of our next home-away-from-home, Niccolo. He guided us to the house along even more narrow and winding roads which he had obviously driven on many times before with his zippy little Moped. We pulled up to a beautiful cottage nestled amongst olive orchards in the hills surrounding Levanto.

After a long day in the car, we decided to stretch our legs at the beach in "downtown" Levanto.

Lorax loves skipping stones!

The beach-lined bay in Levanto. The chain of towns that makes up Cinque Terre are just beyond this seaside mountain. A two hour hike up and over or a 10 minute train ride straight through the bottom! Keep reading to see which option we chose.

Then we headed back to the house to clean up for dinner out on the town! Niccolo provided an excellent list of local restaurants to try, so we made our way back downtown for dinner at Ristorante da Rino on Via Guani (aka Via Garibaldi). Unbeknownst to us, Levanto is a pretty happening town at night so we had to kill some time by getting gelato while waiting for a table to open up. Who says you can't have dessert first?!? The food at da Rino was pretty delicious. I think we all had dishes that involved fresh seafood since we were so close to the sea. Yum! After a long day of travel and very full bellies we turned in for the night. The next morning we planned to get up early to start our epic trek through Cinque Terre.

Day 4:

Our plan for the Cinque Terre hike began with a train ride through the mountains to the first town, Monterosso.  From there we would take the old goat trails along the coast to the other towns of Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore...  or as far as we could make it!

Monterosso was quite beautiful, but we spent very little time here as it was a touch crowded and we were eager to start our long hike. Still, we didn't forget to stop and take a few shots as we began our ascent into the hills.

We knew that our planned route would throw us straight into the steepest section of the hike, but we hadn't quite expected just how many stairs there might be!  Not only did we climb high along the cliffs and into the vineyards over the coast, but the trail also wound back down and up over and over again.  As you can see, the trail also gets rather narrow at times!















The sights made it all completely worth it though.  Between many of the outcropping cliffs ran small streams.  Here we paused on a small foot bridge in the shade.

 Here you can see that we are getting close to Vernazza, just around the corner.  If you look very closely into the distance you can also see two of the other towns further down the coast.

This cat along the trail has it made, and knows it!

We're pretty high up now

Approaching Vernazza

As we made our final decent down into Vernazza we were greeted with some lively music!

After such a long and arduous hike we were ready to refuel with some pizza and plenty of water. We also took a little time to rest our aching legs and take in the local scenery before heading on to Corniglia.

Leaving Vernazza

Ashley & Jeremy waiting for slow Lorax

Eventually we headed back to the trails to make our way to the next town in the Cinque Terre chain, Corniglia. The section of trails between Vernazza and Corniglia was just as steep, but offered many new and interesting views of the surrounding terrain.

Pretty flowers with Corniglia off in the distance

Approaching....

CORNIGLIA!

Corniglia is situated on a high out-cropping of cliffs that juts out into the Ligurian Sea (as you can see from the pictures above). Walking around within the city requires climbing up steep and narrow passageways versus the wide and smooth streets of Vernazza, which is situated on a much flatter portion of coastline and closer to sea-level.

When we got to Corniglia we learned that the trail connecting to the next city, Manarola, had been washed out by mudslides earlier in the year, so if we wanted to continue on we would have to take the train. It was starting to get dark and we were pretty exhausted, so we decided to start heading back to our home in Levanto instead. Before we left Corniglia, we of course stopped to get our daily dose of gelato and then stopped in a local grocery to get some fruit for breakfast the next morning. Thank goodness we stopped at this store!!! Everything looked really tasty, so we decided to get something to make dinner as well. We thought we had picked out some thin pizza crusts, but when we got to the counter the lovely store owner explained that it was actually a local traditional "peasant" pasta that was unique to this region of Italy - Testaroli. It comes as a large thin crepe-like, sponge dough that is traditionally cut into strips and then triangles before being cooked in boiling water (per the lovely grocery store owner) and then served with fresh pesto. Of course we had to try cooking this traditional meal ourselves, so we bought all the supplies the store owner suggested and headed back to our home in Levanto via train. (Like we were gonna hike all the way back with giant grocery bags?!? LOL!)

Heading down to the train station at the bottom of the cliffs surrounding Corniglia.

Preparing the testaroli was incredibly easy. We paired it with some delicious local wine, prosciutto, cheese, and fresh tomatoes. Hands-down one of the BEST meals we had during our time in Italy - local and homemade! Not to mention a well deserved meal after a long day of hiking.

Travel-family sitting down for dinner!!!

Buon appetito!

Day 5:
The next day we unfortunately had to say good-bye to our beautiful home in Levanto, but not without visiting the beach one more time!!!

After getting our fill of sun and sand, we piled into the car and headed to Florence!!!

-The Lorax-

Italy Part 1 - Venice

Hello again! We are finally putting together our blog posts about our trip to Italy in June/July. Of course it is January now and the details are a little fuzzy, but I can at least promise you some cool pictures and funny anecdotes. First, a little background about our adventure: This trip was conceived by myself and two classmates (Ashley and Jeremy) on a cold a dreary morning in Rochester. After finishing an intense test, we were lamenting the tedium of the school year and day-dreaming about how to spend our summer vacation after taking our National Board Examination in May. Of course we were throwing out all sorts of incredible destinations, but we got hooked on a hiking expedition through Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. However, later that week my dear friend Ashley brought to our attention that it seemed silly to spend our precious two weeks of vacation time in cold mountains, exerting ourselves to the max to hike through mountains. "Wouldn't it be better" she said " to spend our vacation filling our bellies with good wine, good food, and relaxing?!". Of course! Brilliant! And so our trip to Italy was born!!!

We spent 10 days traveling from Venice, Cinque Terre, Florence, and Rome - some by plane, train, and automobile. It was a whirlwind tour and definitely one of the best trips I have ever been on to-date! People participating: Ashley, Jeremy, Alex, and me. Lodgings: all apartments/homes were booked through VRBO.com - a fantastic resource for quality housing at a great price! Now...let's begin at the beginning...getting to Venice.

We flew from Rochester to New York City to Paris to Venice. Pretty smooth flights, but we almost missed our connection in Paris because of the ridiculous system they had for filtering people through customs. Basically the louder you yell or plead with the staff the faster you get to jump the line. Thankfully we finally forced our way through and barely made our plane to Venice. The airport in Venice is small and located on the mainland of Italy, so we had to grab our bags, get some Euros, and then jumped on a bus to get to the islands of Venice. We arrived at the Piazzale Roma to find a water taxi to get further into the city. We had a little difficulty figuring out how to use the pay phone, but eventually were able to get in touch with our housing host and made our way into the city via water-taxi.

How do you use this thing?

On the street where we lived! The Arch of Paradise served as a great landmark.
The restaurant underneath turns up again later.

Day 1:
We arrived before our apartment was fully cleaned, so we dropped our bags and headed to Piazza San Marco to check out St. Mark's Basilica and Museo di Palazzo Ducale (The Doge's Palace Museum).

On the way to Piazza San Marco

We stopped in for a delicious snack on the way

While it was relatively early in the morning Venice-time we had been up for quite sometime with our transfer in Paris, so please forgive our jet-lagged faces in the pictures to follow. Also...the Doge's Palace has many, many, many rooms to explore! We were not aware of this fact prior to entry, so we were pretty exhausted after touring maybe 1/3 of the facility. If you really want to see this place in it's entirety and remember it well, then I would recommend you do so after a good nights sleep. ;0)

There was some pretty neat architecture and decoration in and around St. Marks and the Doge's Palace

Sighing on the bridge of sighs

We wound up spending several hours at the Doge's Palace.  By the time we reached the 3rd level of the prison, we just started walking through everything and looking for places to sit.

We explored the palace as best we could on dog-tired feet and then headed home to clean up and then out to dinner.

The restaurant we went to wasn't quite open yet, so we wandered a little bit, finding a little dock walk-out on the Grand Canal











 

 

The pistachio meringue was quite good

...and a tiny confectionery and wine bar, where we had a pistachio meringue and chocolate cookie with a house red.

The house wines tended to be quite tasty

We headed back over to the restaurant just as it opened.  We sat out along the street and enjoyed some white wine and an assortment of Sea Bass and pasta dishes.









By the time we finished dinner and meandered our way home, it was pretty late (and we'd been up for ages!).  So we settled in, had a night cap on the rooftop patio, and went to bed.

Day 2:
The next morning we hopped on a water taxi/bus over to Murano, the island famed for its glass factories.  We watched some glassworking, browsed around in any number of little shops, picked up some trinkets, and wandered our way through the quiet little island.

Some fancy glass works along a street

Window shopping along the canal

Crossing the main canal through Murano

We also had quite a tasty lunch in Murano.  Along our exploration we found some shops with various cheeses, prosciutto, tomatoes, grapes, and a little basil plant.  We walked along the canal and lagoon for a quiet place to sit and eat, and eventually found a little park bench in some shade.  Our snack was very fresh and extra tasty.

Best lunch ever!

We said goodbye to Murano and took the water taxi/bus back past the Doge's palace and the bridge of sighs, and over to St. Marks to see the basilica.

Home base...not too shabby!

After a quick pit stop and coffee break back at our home base, we headed back out to wander the city. 

In the ghet-tooooo

Our travel companion Jeremy is Jewish, and wanted to visit the first ever Jewish ghetto, located in the northern section of Venice.  It was an interesting stop, with very cramped little housing facing a wide open square (is that not the smallest 7-story building you've ever seen in the picture above?).

From there, we wandered throughout the city some more, buying some snacks and art, seeing the sights including the Rialto bridge, and looking for somewhere to eat.

We couldn't quite decide on a place to eat while we were out and about, so when we wound up back at our home we decided to just try the place downstairs. As it turns out, the Ristorante ai Barbacani was absolutely fantastic!  Our candlelit dinner beside the canal was serenaded by a wandering minstrel on his saxophone, while we enjoyed our delectable pasta dishes and wine.  With our appetites sated, the owner then came by to offer some Ouzo-type liqueur and his homemade Limoncello. What a treat!

The next day packed up, picked up our rental car, and said Ciao! to Venice...

Next stop: Cinque Terre!!!

~The Lorax~