Tuesday 16 June 2026 – Did you guess that we would be doing the shorter of today’s walks? I’d say well done, but frankly it wasn’t difficult to work that one out. The main meat of both of the hikes on offer today was to walk between Vernazza and Monterosso; the options were the coastal path or one which went considerably higher and passed by a couple of monasteries. Given that the forecast temperatures were over 30°C, minimising the inevitable uphill work seemed the only logical choice. Of course, our well ‘ard duo opted for the more challenging course, so the team for our walk was the same as yesterday, except that we would be led by Rebecca instead of Tomaso.
We had a bonus, too: the Via dell’Amore, the Way of Love, a short and mercifully level walk between the furthest village, Riomaggiore, and its neighbour, Manarola, had very recently been re-opened. A landslide had closed it in 2012, and it took until 2024 for the repair work to be completed. Riomaggiore, therefore, would be our first destination as we once again hit the 0849 Cinque Terre Express southwards from Bonassola.
On the way to the station, as usual, we passed the town’s church, Chiesa di Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, which is quite an imposing, if not over-ornate building.
Tomaso had told us that it was now the repository for some religious artefacts that had once been in various other churches in the mountains which were now closed. We had actually been in for a look around the previous evening, and the inside is a great deal more sumptuous than the outside.
Among the items from other churches are a couple of processional crosses, which require a tag team of fit young men to carry them on festival days, as they are not insubstantial.
The base is paddle-shaped and fits into a pouch slung over the necks of the carriers, who sway the cross a little from side to side as they go, to make sure that they retain control over its balance. I can imagine one of those crosses would do a lot of damage to someone in the crowd by the procession if they lost control….
The church has a very lavishly decorated and ornamented interior, with some fine stained glass work.
There is some decent trompe l’oeil on view in Bonassola on the walk to the station.
The walls really are only painted, but the illusion of depth is compelling. And there are a couple of nice quirky touches, too.
The train was pretty busy, but we all managed to find seats for the six stops to Riomaggiore, and it was clear at the far end that crowds would be a feature of the day.
We fought our way through the crowded town to the start of the Via dell’Amore, which is a level pathway created along the cliffs to Manarola.
Along the way, there are plaques in the wall.
These are just a few of the many we passed. Our group amused ourselves as we walked along by trying to work out what the link was. There was a strong Graeco-Roman mythology theme – Nereids, Helen of Troy, Cupid, Telemachus and so on. The one that took us longest to work out was this:
Partenope seems to have been the subject of operas by Handel and, amazingly, Ennio Morricone, inter alia. The Handel offering seems to be par for the course for opera, involving unrequited love, love triangles and transvestitism. Various other operas involving Partenope have also been written, but we decided that the important thing was that Partenope was a mermaid siren, whose singing failed to tempt Odysseus, so she cast herself into the sea where the waves carried her body to the bay of Naples; the original Greek settlement there was called Partenope before the Romans renamed it. So the theme linking the plaques was Love. Who’d’a thunk it, eh? The theme was carried on by one of those tiresome love padlock walls towards the end
but at least we had a decent view at this point of the back end of Manarola.
To get to the start of our walk, we had to catch a train to Vernazza, and this was a reasonably fraught process, because the station was rammed. Rebecca had to urge us on to the train very volubly, as the train guards, in an attempt to stop the train falling even further behind time, have a habit of shutting the doors even as people are still trying to get on and off. Anyway, we all managed to get on, for an uncomfortable few minutes up the line to Vernazza.
The crowds were so bad that it took us a while even to get out of the station, and I pitied this poor tour guide.
I think there were about 50 people in her group and she was trying to marshal them and get them out of the station amid all the crowds. We did get out eventually, and the streets were exactly as crowded as one might have expected.
The well ‘ard mob got themselves some lunch, because they would be out all the day
and we pressed on
to the start of our walk.
The “official” time for the walk, therefore is two hours. Hold that thought. Off we went, at first through the narrow back streets of Vernazza
but eventually emerging on to a path that led – imagine my surprise! – uphill. We got some wonderful views of Vernazza as we toiled our way along.
but the way was emphatically upwards.
You reach a spot where there’s an iconic view of the town
but it took me a while to get that shot because of all the fuckwits who wanted to make sure that the view included themselves.
And still upwards we went.
on a path that was really quite crowded, with people going in each direction.
As we reached the highest point of the path, we passed through a farm where disused terraces had been brought back into operation.
With the terrain as steep as it is in the Cinque Terre region, terracing is really the only way to farm the land – vines, olives, fruit trees. The whole region was once a vibrant agricultural region and a noted wine producer, ever since Roman times. The steep paths leading to and from the terraces were the only way to get between the villages on land, and the journey by sea was often the prime way of getting around. The railway that opened around 1870 and connected the villages, ironically, was the knell of doom for the area, as it actually made it easy for people to move away, and so the drystone walls retaining the terraces fell into disrepair. Consequences of this were made most tragically clear in 2011 when a series of massive storms hit Europe, including Cyclone Meeno and Tropical Storm Rolf. Some 22 inches of rain fell in the region in four hours, and Monterosso and Vernazza were particularly hard hit when hundreds of tons of mud and debris were washed down through the town. There are some extraordinary pictures to be seen of the devastation and the comparison to the miraculous restoration over a period of just two years. Even now, there are warnings about the risk to this increasingly fragile environment.
The permits we bought, therefore, are an important part of maintaining the region’s infrastructure, and knowing about the floods and landslides goes a long way to explaining why the paths are as they are – with rustic steps that have been added and maintained over the years, as well as tricky passages of rough terrain which demand care to get over.
Another thing we learnt on this walk was the richness of the environment. I had thought that the Cinque Terre was just a set of pretty fishing villages, but actually, according to an info board we passed, “The vegetation of the Cinque Terre is very rich, in fact the list of the superior plants living there counts almost one thousand species, that is about 1/6 of the whole national flora and 1/3 of the regional one.” Agriculture, and particularly viticulture, was the hallmark of the area – the fishing villages schtick was a 19th-century piece of marketing to get more tourists to the region. The vibrant colours of the houses date more from this era than from olden times.
So, that farm represents a significant piece of progress in a hard-hit area.
Rebecca then sprang a surprise on us – a most welcome one – in the form of a rest stop.
The speciality of the place was freshly squeezed fruit juice, as could be seen from the entry
(though it sold beer, which I wish I’d known before I ordered juice) and was the scene of a very strange conversational passage. I was chatting to one of our group when the lass next to me on the other side chipped in on our conversation. Her name was Rachel, she was from Australia but had lived in the UK for a while. So the three of us chatted until the lady from our group went off to find the loo. To keep the conversation going, I fell back on the first rule of small talk, which is “talk about your companion’s favourite topic – themselves”. She was still of working age, so I thought I’d find out what her job was. Rather than just boringly ask “so what do you do, then?”, I asked her what she did to cover the bills. Her reply was “I don’t really want to talk about that”, which rather stumped me. She made her excuses and moved on soon after, leaving me wondering if I’d unwittingly committed some major social faux pas. The rest of our group took the piss out of me something shocking, and Rebecca particularly so, joking that Rachel clearly was on the game and that we’d made an appointment for an assignation later on.
Anyhoo….
It had taken us nearly two hours to reach the rest stop, despite the official hour and a half time on this sign. This was partly due to needing to rest, but also, I think, because progress was slow at times because of the crowds, which really put a brake on progress. (And, yes, gave us a chance to rest.) It then took us a little over half an hour to get down to Monterosso, which we caught sight of soon after the rest stop.
On the left above is the new town, which we’d seen on the first day’s hike, and on the right is the somewhat separated old town, which we headed to down, you guessed it, a steep path.
In several places we passed what Rebecca called a monorail
and that’s what it really is – a transport mechanism for the buckets full of grapes that had been hand picked, that being the only way to harvest in these steep terraces. We soon reached the checkpoint at the Monterosso end of the walk
and headed into the old town for a glass of something cold and some lunch, which included farinata, the Italian chickpea pancake, on offer in this place coming with pesto spread on it. I contented myself with a ham and cheese focaccia.
Rebecca then led us on a brief tour of the old town. Which was
fairly crowded, though not as rammed as the other, more accessible villages in the region. There are a fair few buildings of a religious persuasion dotted around the old town. Firstly, we passed the main church, the Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista,
with its unusual 18-point rose window, and took a look inside.
It is very ornate, and has an amazing altar.
Next to it is the Oratorio Mortis et Orationis (Death and Prayer) – Confraternita dei Neri (Brotherhood of the Blacks).
The people who worked here wore black robes and provided burial services for the less fortunate and prayed for the souls of the dead.
There’s also the Oratorio di Santa Croce o dei Bianchi, another building very much in the Florentine style,
and also very ornate inside.
Until the 17th century, this was the HQ of the Confraternity of the Bianchi (“Whites”), so called because of the colour of the robes they wore during processions. Their task was to manage the hospital and care for the sick. I am guessing that the model ship hanging from the ceiling is the same as those we saw on the Camino, placed there by grateful sailors who have successfully returned from voyages. Although not entirely rammed, there were still tour groups moving through to add to the general throng.
There were some shops on the main street that offered some attractive retail therapy for some of our group, so while they shopped, I headed back for another coffee and then we walked through the 1870s-era tunnel that led through to the new town in order to catch the train home. In a side niche in the tunnel, Jane spotted this unusual installation.
In the new town, we bade farewell to the beaches
and if you look carefully, in the distance you can see Vernazza, our starting point for this walk. We were headed north out of the region, so our platform was reasonably clear, but the one for the other direction was crowded with tour groups
not all of whom were dressed in the most decorous fashion.
Whatever….
We were soon back at the hotel, and after the obligatory shower and change, back on the terrace for pre-dinner drinks. There was no official hike arranged for the next day; we had a day at our own leisure. I suppose we could have spent it lazing round at the hotel or on the beach, but we didn’t. Acting on a tip from Tomaso, we went for a walk. Obviously. To find out where we went, stay tuned!
