It’s all Rick Steves’ fault
With all the good things PBS’ Rick Steves had to say about Cinque Terra, we had to see it for ourselves. But unfortunately, the secret is out and it seems half of the world’s population was there.
Saturday, April 26, 2025, was a beautiful day. I had to get up early to go pick up our rental car, because they were closed on Sunday, when we needed it.
When I got back Marie and I headed for the train station for our trip to Cinqua Terra. Because of an Italian holiday on Friday, April 26th, the train was very crowded. You had Italians taking advantage of a long weekend, students on a school break, and thousands of tourists, all taking a long holiday.
Our plan was to take the ferry from Riomaggiore to Monterosso de Mare and then hike back from Monterosso to Riomaggiore stopping to visit the three towns in between. While looking for information about the ferry, we ran into Luca who talked us into a private 12 person tour. It was the best decision of the day.
Our boat pilot was Phillipo, (Marie said, “Cute, cute, cute) and his girlfriend Anna, from Colorado Springs, was also on the boat with us. She is a lovely girl who is an au pair in Rome and also works at a bakery. The boat ride was lovely and they stopped for a while if anyone wanted to take a swim. One young girl and an older gentleman were the only two to jump into what we would call chilly waters. It was about 65 degrees cold. Brrr!.
When the boat stopped in Monterosso de Mare, Marie and I were the only two to disembark, as the rest were making the return trip to Riomaggiore. The wimps didn’t want to walk the trail like us 76-year-old adventurers. Oh, if we only knew.
We couldn’t find the booth to purchase our tickets for the Cinque Terra trail, so we saw where it began and we started walking up. Not too bad, nice stairs and walkways with railings. About 500 feet up the trail was the ticket booth. The attended told us it would take about two hours, but warned us it was a rugged trek. Then when she asked if we were over 70, we thought she was going to tell us we were too old to walk it, but instead she said we qualified for the over-70 discount ticket price.
We should have taken the hint. It was a really rugged trail, with the uneven steps carved out of the mountain stones, and the flat area of the trail — if you could call them “flat” — barely wide enough for one person to walk and without any guardrails. A shear drop into the Mar Ligure.
But Marie and I were determined, or as they say in Italian dialect, testa duro. We pushed on, and pushed on. We were taking many, many breaks until we thought we reached the top to begin our decent, thinking that would be easier. Oh, how foolish we were. It was more up, up, up.
We finally did reach the highest point and started our decent. Wow, Phillipo did say coming down was harder than going up. You had to watch where you placed your feet as you tried to stop yourself from falling forward.
Finally, our destination was in sight from the trail, the town of Vernazza. Whew!! Just another “several thousand feet” down. We persevered. Standing in the main plaza of the town, tired and sweaty, we were pretty proud of ourselves. We passed several young kids coming from the opposite direction and they also were huffing and puffing.
Marie and I didn’t think we should attempt the next leg of the trail, as it was already 4:30 p.m., so we opted to take the train to the next village, Corniglia. That seemed just as rugged a trip as the walking the trail. It was only a ten minute ride, but the train platform was crowded, and when the train arrived everyone surged forward trying to get a seat on an already crowded car.
Seeing as we were going to get off at the next town we opted to stand next to the door and just hop off. Surprise, the train switched tracks in Corniglia and we had to push through a crowd of people to the opposite door before the engineer took off again.
We headed out of the station towards the town center and found a line of people waiting to board a bus. There was only one bus, but at least two bus-loads of people, so it would be a while before we got on to go to the central plaza.
Marie and I thought we’d walk, but we were looking up a very step road. Oh, well, touring Corniglia is meant for another day. Back to the station and straight back to La Spezia on another crowded train. We were calling it quits on Cinque Terra.
Once we were back in our hotel, we closed our eyes for about an hour. Remember Marie and I had walked a very difficult trail and fought a hoard of other tourists. We felt exhausted.
We really didn’t have anything of substance to eat all day, so we headed to the pedestrian-only walkway in central La Spezia that is lined with many types of restaurants.
After looking at various menus in front of the eateries, we picked La Mia Nonna. I had the spaghetti and mussels — delicious — and Marie had spaghetti carbonara — excellent. Of course, gelato followed.
Marie and I called it a night and headed to bed to get up early for our road trip to Berbenno and Como.