The first (and most southern) of the five villages after heading north along the coastline from Portovenere is the tiny port of Riomaggiore.
I remember having my first pizza with anchovies in this little village on my first visit to the Cinque Terre in May of 2001. Riomaggiore is also a popular starting point for hikers. Each of the five villages is connected by a hiking trail. Starting at the “bottom" or southern end of the trail leading out of Riomaggiore, the trail becomes longer and more physically demanding as you proceed north from town to town. So between Riomaggiore and the next village up 
(Manarola), the hike is fairly simple and easy … more like a walk along a paved pathway, with few heavy “ups and downs” along the way. Little children and older walkers seem to manage fine on this leg.Of course, this is no ordinary walk. The height above the sea gives enormous perspective of the coastline, and the sights are breathtaking. From the surf crashing far below the trail, to the grape vineyards clinging to the 200 year-old terraces above the path, it’s an amazing experience.
Even the rock that forms this coastline is amazing … with twisted strata and up-ended monoliths, you can put on your amateur geologist’s hat and clearly see the torturous pressures at work here -- pressures that at one point pushed the Alps up into the sky. The layers you see in this picture were perfectly flat and horizontal when they were first formed.Why all the geologic commotion? Africa. Really! The tectonic plate that supports the continent of Africa presses against Europe with a force only a floating continent can deliver. It gains only one inch per year in its struggle to merge with Europe, but over eons of time that annual progress of compression has definitely left its mark on Italy, as it juts south into the Mediterranean in its eternal attempt to keep Africa in its place. The continual earthquakes and volcanoes of this country are the direct results in our times. You might say Vesuvius erupted because of Africa.
Anyway, back to the “trail” -- everyone visiting the Cinque Terre should at least do that first leg heading north out of Riomaggiore. It's truly an easy (but breathtaking) walk to the next town to the north, little Manarola. Continuing north from Manarola, the trail does become a bit steeper, so continue walking only if you have time, energy and strength. If you do continue your hike, the next stop will be the “Number 3” town of Corniglia (“cor-NEEL-yah”), which is set high up on a sea cliff and is the only one of the towns without some kind of port area. The families of Corniglia are better known for their wines and olive oils than their seamanship. If you've had enough hiking, you can take the northbound train out of Manarola, which will stop next at a station immediately below Corniglia. 
My boat’s next stop was my destination town (and personal favorite): Vernazza. I first visited the Cinque Terre in 2001, and then again in 2007, but this time was different, because I was going to be staying for three nights in a little apartment right in Vernazza. What a privilege. I would eventually trek on up to the most northern Cinque Terre member town (Monterosso – the only one of these towns that allows cars in its streets), but first I wanted to settle into my new home.
My landlord, Bartolo Lercari, met me at the dock and happily led me up to my new abode in the town as he pointed out various points of interest along the way. Bartolo is a distinguished, articulate, and energetic person, and I immediately felt like I had my first ally in this town. As we passed by an old man sitting in the sunlight on the main road up the hill, Bartolo said “Ciao Babo” and then turned to me and said, “That’s my father, he’s 87 years old. His name is Ercole, and for many years he ran the best pizzaria in town. Now he’s retired and he just enjoys life.” Bartolo’s family has been part of Vernazza for many generations. I saw evidence of this in the town cemetery where there are a good number of Lercari tombs. He now owns most of the vineyards on the slopes above the town and continues making his highly regarded local wines: Perciò, Sciacchetrà, and DOC Cinque Terre, all delicious.
He hosted this wine tasting party for a group of 50 visiting Sweeds and invited me to join, which I of course did. His wife, Lisa, is the actual seller of the wine, and she speaks Swedish, so I hope they sold a lot. It was a fun wine tasting, with various Sweeds in the tour group wondering who I was -- this stranger who didn’t “look Italian at all.” I spoke at length to one 50 year-old cardiologist who said he had been to several medical conventions in Dallas over the years. When I complimented his perfect English, he said that, of course, most of the medical literature of today is written in English, so it’s essential for specialists to know the language fluently. “The New England Journal of Medicine is not translated into Swedish,” he quipped with a big grin. His favorite thing in America? California wine. “It’s much better than Americans think it is. I like it much better than French wines.”
There really isn't much “to do” in Vernazza, but I don’t think activities are what draw people here. It’s a storybook setting, and what a lot of visitors are doing is nothing in particular. I was okay with that, especially after my week-long touring of Tuscany. They know that the world beyond this coast is a frenetic place, but here one driftes into letting the angle of the sun mark the time of day. Here they still honor the national creed of Italy . . . “Il dolce far niente” (the sweetness of doing nothing). 
That doesn’t mean all of this “nothing” is effortless, mind you. This town clings to a mountain side. Down is easy; up take some huffing and puffing. The side streets are all “stepped” to make climbing a bit easier (although it’s not a lot of help with wheeled luggage, which you end up picking up and carrying). They are narrow and endlessly mysterious. The buildings are more like individual towers lined up side-by-side, with archways high above the street, connecting the buildings from one side of the street to the opposite. It’s sort of like the buildings are saying “I’ll hold you up if you hold me up … together we’ll be fine.” Maybe that’s the nature of the residents of those buildings, too. People who reside in small, remote villages seem to understand that their neighbors are "all we've got." They live lives propping each other up, making for a happier village life. You see this everywhere in the Cinque Terre.
All of the up and down treading requires concentrated fuel, so gelato is always available in all the flavors you could ever ask for. It’s no secret that gelato is one of the best reasons for coming to Italy in the first place. Made strictly with milk (not cream), the fat calories are few. And the sugar will be burned off in the unending climbing and descending. 
Otherwise, you will see a lot of sitting on benches and just watching the sunset, reading a book, chatting with neighbors, or taking pictures of kids in the square kicking around a soccer ball or zooming by on in-line skates. As the sun sets in the west, over France, the lateral light continues to illuminate the colorful umbrellas in the town square, making the people under them glow with the same hues. 
This is one of the ring leaders of the town kids. Little Mateo is one of my next-door neighbors, and he only knows how to speak at full yell. I saw him delivering some kind of paper notices to various doors along our narrow street after school one day, and I assume it pertained to some upcoming school project. He’s a good example of “free range” kids in this part of the world. After school he has permission to be anywhere in the town with his friends, as long as he doesn’t get in people’s way and is home by suppertime. I wish I had been able to snap a picture of one little tike the second night I was in Vernazza. In a restaurant a toddler had been eating with his parents. When they finished his mother lead him by the hand to the front door to exit, while he, dragging behind her, with his pacifier firmly clinched far to one side of his mouth so he could continue talking, was saying “Ciao tutti, ciao tutti, ciao tutti” to every table he passed (meaning “good bye everyone”). I guess he realized we’d all miss him. It was about as cute as it gets.
During the daylight hours, I was driven by good weather. If it’s cloudy or raining, there’s no reason to rush to get out into the town and snap photos, but if the weather is sunny and beautiful, you’ve got to (as Janis Joplin said) “get it while you can.” Tomorrow may be a lost cause if the Mediterranean starts storming up, as it can do.
On Wednesday my main objective was to hop a train north to Levanto (very nearby) to meet up with friends from Hawaii. As I got ready to go, I discovered that my camera battery was dead. Then, after furiously searching for the spare battery and the charger, I realized that I had left them in my car in the garage in Portovenere. I emailed my friends and told them I might be a tad bit late, but I was not coming to visit them without a functioning camera. They understood completely.
That is one of the best lessons I’ve learned traveling in Italy over the years (this is my 13th trip). It’s not a question of whether or not things will go wrong on the trip. They will. They always do. The question is how well and how quickly you can recover.
Instead of heading north, I hopped on the next train heading south to La Spezia (a large port city). From there, I got a taxi to Portovenere, had him stop at the garage, fetched my extra battery and charger (feeling foolish for having forgotten them when I was “packing light” for my three days in the Cinque Terre), hopped back in the cab, got back to the La Spezia train station ($60) and got the next train heading to Levanto in the north. I had recovered.
Denny and Debby Wright met me at the train station in Levanto. It was a joy to see them again. Debby and I were law partners back in the early and mid-80’s at Passman & Jones in Dallas. In 1987 she and Denny, and kids, picked up and moved to Maui just because they wanted to, and they’re still there today. They are two people who seem so full of happiness you just can’t get enough of them. They joke around, they ask questions, they’re interested in everything! We had numerous glasses of local wines and finally ended up at a restaurant in Levanto, joined by their son Doug and his wife and two little angel daughters. It was a wonderful evening. It had probably been almost 20 years since I had seen them. They had changed very little. How random to have had our paths cross in Italy of all places.On Thursday I decided to take a train up to Bonassola and see what Hemmingway’s favorite city on this coast was like. I didn’t see what he saw and was happy to head south again toward Monterosso. Waiting for that train, I met a troop of German scouts (3 girls and 4 boys, all in full scout uniforms) who were trekking through Italy for a couple of weeks. They seemed like exceptional kids. My only inwardly negative thought was “I wonder how much these very German-looking kids resemble the Hitler Youth of the 1930’s and 40’s.” I don’t know where that came from, but the point is … how wrong our impressions can be. As they asked me questions about Texas (I'm sure for the purpose of practicing their English on me more than any actual interest in Texas), I noticed the patch each of them wore on their uniforms at the left shoulder.
I couldn’t believe my eyes at first. Their troop was named for Martin Luther KING (i.e., not just Martin Luther, which I would have understood immediately). I pointed it out to them and asked “Why Marting Luther King?”“Be-cass … well … zee I Have A Dream … You know it?”
Yes, I did know it. Maybe there’s hope after all.
I visited Monterosso briefly and then hopped the next train south to Vernazza again for my last evening in town. I think the people of this town are very interesting. They are very hard working.
I found this one local laborer using a gas motor driven “tank” to carry buckets of gravel (weighing a ton, I’m sure) up the steps of a narrow side “street.” I can’t imagine what it must have been like for the builders of this town to do this all by human labor alone. Otherwise, “streets” in Vernazza are for pedestrian traffic. They do permit garbage trucks and delivery vehicles into the town at daybreak, but once they depart, there’s nothing but human beings. The town has very nice cafes and restaurants, but I think the people of Vernazza cannot escape their heritage any more than the rest of us can.
They are, so often here, families of fishermen. Going to sea has been in their blood for centuries. That’s why the service in the plaza or in the tiny restaurants along Via Roma can seem a bit rough or abrupt at times, lacking finesse. They are fishermen making a more profitable life for themselves in catering to the needs of tourists, but it seems not to come “naturally” to many of them, as it might in Rome or Milan. They don’t have a lot of patience for the tourists that bop into town every day, and that is understandable. Tourists present to them all that is chaotic: questions they don’t quite understand, requests, demands, frustration, obstructions to foot traffic, constantly stopping and taking pictures in the middle of a busy pedestrian street, all that is odd and frustrating. And the tourists never really stay. They will be on the next boat or train to “elsewhere” - - so there isn’t much chance to “see” the real person inside that tourist “figure” standing before them. No real connection, just the prospect of income for goods and services sold, clumsy interaction and then POOF … they’re gone. That’s why I wanted to stay in Vernazza for three days. I wanted to see the same waiters day after day, so they’d recognize me. I wanted to see how that might change things. Predictably, it did. I started getting those “knowing nods of the head,” and that meant I was recognized for being different from the mob. I was in. I liked that.
