Cinque Terre - Manarola and Riomaggiore

Day #1 in Cinque Terre

A quick summary of Cinque Terre. Cinque Terre is 5 villages connected by hiking trails and railroad, but with very, very few roads. It is a part of the Cinque Terre National Park that is located on the northwestern cost of Italy between Genova and La Spezia. It has become a tourist attraction for the fantastic hiking and beautiful buildings built up along the rugged coast line. http://www.cinqueterre.com/eng/


Our train left Milan early Saturday morning for Manarola. Once in Manarola we followed the directions that the hotel gave us, "Walk through the tunnel. Turn right and we will be along the way." Exact addresses are hard to come by in these villages.

Our room had a deck that looked out over the village. I have no idea what the people on Trip Advisor were talking about when they said that the hotel owners were not nice. The lady offered us coffee while we waited for our room to be ready and her husband was very friendly as well.

Another view from our deck.

Bottle of the most delicious olive oil ever made. They definitely put something in there to make it addictive.

At lunch, Michael and I discovered we could survive only on bread, fresh parmesan and olive oil. We always needed multiple baskets of bread at our meals. Olive oil and pesto are both made in the area of Cinque Terre so we made an effort to consume as much as possible at every meal. I got a pasta and lobster dish with delicious lobster, but the pasta was even better. Who would have guessed! Michael had gnocchi with pesto and whatever else was on the two other plates that ended up on our little table. Though out the trip we had this recurring issue of no room for all of the food that we ordered to be placed on our table.

We set out on our first hike to Riomaggiore. What a beautiful path long the ocean! The walking path is the arches on the top and the railroad goes through the bottom arches in the wall.

Can you find Michael? That man climbs everywhere.

I wasn't willing to go as far.

After Michael finally rejoined me back on the trail we had only a short work to Riomaggiore. We were walking up this rather steep street and getting quite out of breath, but not as much as this guy. He has his own tactic to surviving the hike which involved the loudest breathing ever combined with a bit of whistling/wind tunnel noise we had ever heard.

After navigating our way through some narrow alleys, only large enough for one person to walk through at a time, we made our way to a small cafe for drink. Great view of the ocean.

Riomaggiore - on our way out of town

Stopped for a great view of the town as we were leaving.

We saw people swimming in the water so Michael thought he would test it out. COLD! was the only comment I received.


I found these fun purple things on the ground that looked similar prickly pears from when I grew up. We used to pull them open and there was fluffy white stuff instead. I decided it would be fun to jump on one to pop it open. Instead of fuzzy white stuff, Purple liquid shot out everywhere! Michael just shook his head and kept walking. I stayed away from the purple things after that.

We decided to continue beyond the town into the rest of the national park. The path was literally on the edge of the cliff for a portion of the walk. It then turned into the woods for awhile and we had to climb up tricky stairs that were made of logs or tree roots.

The sun began setting so we started navigating our way back to Riomaggiore in the dark.

There were not any other hikers on the trail. The only other person we saw was this fisherman that was not quite ready to call it a day yet.

By the time we finished dinner it was pitch black out so the walk back to Manarola was interesting. Isn't the city beautiful at night though?

Day #1 in Cinque Terre was complete. The next day we planned to hike to the other three towns.