The Five Lands appear, as I heard an Englishwoman say, “much of a muchness,” yet they are just distinct enough to create preferences among travelers. Do you like fettuccine rather than linguine? Barolo over Barbaresco? For me the answer is yes and yes, but that day, with the drizzle, I wanted Manarola.
Dingy, spottedly gray street cats, half feral and half mean, got themselves into compact hunches on window ledges or under low eaves to escape a dripping that was neither rain nor mist but somewhere betwixt. The dampness carried down along the lane a heavy, vinous scent of a wine press just rinsed after crushing white grapes glazed with red like a tippler’s nose. When the weather changed, residents would again climb above Manarola to terraced vineyards like hanging gardens, and workers would balance burdens of picked fruit along narrow, stone walls that create plots no more than 10 to 20 feet wide and hold vines in a soil so scarce I couldn’t imagine what sustained them beyond sea mist and sunlight. Across the narrow via in front of me were results of the labor: wicker baskets of grapes ready to be partly dried before going to the press, a method that gives the indigenous wine some of its distinction.
Down the via—hardly a street, since it’s so narrow a child’s afternoon shadow can fall across it and rise three feet up the wall opposite—just above the harborette, fishermen had drawn up their dories on wheeled cradles and parked them like automobiles, vehicles here almost as unexpected as donkeys in Hoboken. To get into the villages, you typically must walk, or take a local train along a route more tunnel than otherwise, or you may arrive by boat.
The harbor, only the size of a baseball infield, lies protected by a small rock mole, which on that morning almost quieted waves then in considerable aggravation after two days of a libeccio, the wind out of Libya that blows fine desert sand onto terraces. Perhaps Saharan dust is the engendering agent, the sapore (to lift a word from an Italian kitchen), that puts the distinctive taste in Ligurian wine and olives.
A small place needs small things, and Cinque Terre olive “groves” often contain only a half dozen diminutive trees producing dark fruits hardly bigger than swollen raisins. If their flesh is thin, their flavor is thick; like hot peppers, the olives are little but potent with taste, as if to reduce is to intensify. In Corniglia at lunch one day, following a hilly hike, I ate 48 of them and stopped simply because I’d emptied the bowl and knew pasta mixed with potatoes, a Ligurian specialty, was on the way. When the waiter collected the dish of pits, he said, “Bene, bene!”
After I’d finished lunch, I took a glass of the signature beverage of the Cinque Terre, sciacchetrà, a white dessert wine, something I usually pass over, but I figured then it would keep me from a big almond gelato. The sciacchetrà had a fine bouquet of pears, its sweetness light. What’s better to a traveler than to have presumption knocked galley-west?
Although italians usually drink down their little cups of coffee in a swallow or two, I lingered over mine back in Manarola in hopes the drizzle would stop. To ease caffeine from a second cup, I asked (the place specializing in panini) for a sandwich of sliced tomatoes, fresh basil, and “olives sauce,” although what I really wanted was my lunch of a couple days earlier in Vernazza, where I’d ordered a plate of another characteristic food—fresh anchovies. While it isn’t true that I alone keep the little fish on the menu of two pizza parlors in my hometown, I do take to them as a Missouri farmer to Sunday fried chicken.
Expecting what Americans call anchovies, I was surprised to see set before me not minuscule, brown slivers of oversalted fish, but white fillets the length of my hand, seasoned only with olive oil, fresh basil, and a wedge of lemon. I should never have tasted them. They ruined me. I’ll never be the same. One ought to think twice before entering or eating of Paradise.
My Manarola panino was good, but nothing I couldn’t assemble at home, and I paid more attention to the opening sky than to the sandwich. A large man, florid of face, a white mustache dripping the last of the mist onto his chin as if to cool it, paused at my table and said, “Musica?” and pulled a violin from beneath his jacket. Given the lingering dampness in his bow, his old tunes sounded more melancholy than artful.
When he finished, I lifted my “corrected” cup and asked, “Coffee?” In English, accented but accurate, he said, “I accept your offer,” and sat down. He was a Tuscan from over the hills, but he’d spent much time on the streets of the Italian Riviera even down to the Cinque Terre. Said he, “I’ve lived also in America. I went to Toronto, but after a year I moved south to get a softer winter.” I asked where that was. “Detroit.”
His Christian name was Secondo. He leaned forward as if to confess: “I should be Terzo, Third, but the first second boy died.”
Off came his jacket in the warming day. Beneath he wore a carmine vest and a green Gypsy blouse full in the sleeves. Gesturing toward his getup, Secondo said, “For the theater of the street. You have to look the part to make a buck.” I asked did he make good bucks as a strolling musician, and he said, “I do better now because I’m old. I don’t play as well, not so strong as I used to, but I earn more because an old man working a street makes tourists feel guilty. They know they’re useless except to spend a buck.” He stroked the violin with hands seemingly too big for it, fingers too meaty to pizzicato, yet they still could.
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