La Spezia and the Cinque Terre11 May 2012
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Cinque Terre
I'm sleeping, I'm not dead. The cat.
Corniglia
| From Lucca I booked a little hotel in La Spezia for 4 nights. I knew it to be a port town and had read at the end of the Second World War, it became the point of departure for the survivors from the Nazi concentration camps. Also between 1945 and 1948 over 23,000 Jews managed to leave Italy clandestinely for Palestine. It is one of the main Italian military and commercial harbours and I imagined it would be a big uninteresting industrial town, but handy to the Cinque Terre. But was I surprised. It’s a lovely place. Our first day there we caught a train to Vernazza with the intention of walking the 1 ½ hr coastal track back to Corniglia. However we soon discovered all coastal tracks bar a very short one, were closed for maintenance. There had been a lot of distruction in the area, particularly to the village of Vernazza, in flooding last October. We saw an enormous amount of reconstruction going on to the lower levels of the buildings there. There were posters put up showing the devastation of the floods, so they have come a very long way with restoration. Anyway on advice, we took the train back to Corniglia to walk the mountain track to Manarola. We headed up the track and after 20 minutes straight up we decided we probably weren’t up to it so we stopped and had our lunch. After the rest we felt better so continued on about another ¼ hour till we reached the top. After that the path went straight around the side of the hill. Pretty trecherous in some parts but such a lovely walk and spectacular views. Thru someones back yard, thru stands of pine trees, thru the vineyards and olive groves, thru peoples vege gardens and thru a small village where we stopped for a cool rest in a little church. It was a hot day. Then it was time to go down. We ran into an Australian couple coming the other way and she was swearing and he was poaring with sweat. I told them it was only a few more minutes to the top and she said they had already walked up about 2,000 steps (no exaggeration I don’t think) for 45 minutes! I thought, thank goodness we’re going down. But by the time we got to the bottom of all those bloody steps my legs were like jelly!! All in all, with stops, the walk took us about 3 hours. |
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