We travel to some places even before we know where on the globe they are, or that they even exist. Images arise in our childhood imaginings, scenes that can express longings for a world more fantastic than the one we inhabit. But still, we understand such demesnes are impossible because logic says hills can’t be so steep, towns can’t look like castles, and, above all, sooner or later we learn that every place must answer to time and the devil. Fantasy or not, some of those realms remain, lying in wait until they find a chance to become real travels. I think, although I’m not certain, that’s how I came to be sitting one September morning in a sidewalk café in Manarola, Italy, in a region named Le Cinque Terre—the Five Lands.
These five villages—a more accurate term today—are Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. They lie along the exact edge of that northern thrust of the Mediterranean called the Ligurian Sea. Some 80 miles due south, French Corsica points its finger of a peninsula directly at them as if to call the attention of the world. If ever a place seemed marked by topography for notice, it is the Five Lands.
Yet the opposite has happened over the past thousand years. Even the Romans, known for extending empire anywhere they could reach by foot or boat, little heeded this piece of coast, choosing instead to build their great interterritorial Aurelian Way on the easier eastern side of the low—if rather rugged—mountains that trap the villages between rock and sea in a surround all but impossible for plow and hearth. Such a difficult steepness may serve birds and beasts, but humans? We’re made for life reasonably horizontal.
Over the years, a belief grew that what ancient Rome ignored, no one else should care about either. In that neglect the villages slipped through the centuries to arrive in ours as places from another time: gifts, if not quite in plain view from the interior, then at least so from the sea, to which they belong as Venice does to its lagoon or Perugia to its hill. Such isolation gave reprieve from the ruinous turmoil that has swept Europe since the Romans themselves let their empire fall into less dominant hands. Indeed, in the last world war, the people of the Cinque Terre could watch Allied bombers on the way to blast the harbor at Genoa, 42 miles northwestward from Monterosso, and smear the one at La Spezia, only three miles from Riomaggiore. (The name Manarola may derive from the Manes, Roman spirits of the friendly dead who—properly honored with lentils, bread, wine, oil—might bring protection, health, and longevity.)
The villages, survivors though they be, are not ancient by Mediterranean standards; rather, they are expressions of the late Middle Ages heavily doctored by the 19th century. In Manarola, where I sat that morning in front of a beverage to ward off the drizzle—caffè corretto, espresso “corrected” with a dollop of grappa—I couldn’t visualize Augustus Caesar walking down the street, but I could imagine Dante on a visit from his Florence not far over the mountains, or Shelley and Byron in search of some bit of the poetically picturesque.
Manarola, like its four sisters, shouldn’t be here at all, not if the founders had really followed common sense and looked logically at the landscape, because there is no space for a hamlet any more than there’s room for vineyards and olive groves on the declivitous and stony hills that come right to the sea like a door to a jamb. To solve the problems of a terrain that runs more up and down than otherwise, Manarolans took to a cleft—you can’t call it a valley—cradling a strong mountain stream, and topped it with narrow pavement while leaving access to the darkened water below that now murmurs under their feet like Manes from the netherworld.
Being denied a lateral landscape, builders chiseled niches into the cliffs in order to stack up shops and rooms in such a way that Manarola, were you to turn it on its side, would cover about as much space horizontally as vertically. The slender, twisted lanes seem to rest more atop each other than lie side by side in proper street fashion, so that someone looking out a rear fourth-floor window can peer directly into the eyes of a stroller on the very next via. It is such architecture in an unexpected location that gives all the villages an aura from a child’s dream.
Then, too, there’s the way the hamlets challenge the sea by setting foundations right against it as a pugilist does his nose to an opponent. These abrupt stone rises of dwellings suggest more a complex of castles than a village. Of all the reasons tourists come to see the Five Lands, the primary one is the peculiar, ocean-beset buildings painted in warm Mediterranean colors. Here the Riviera ends, and life is not about beaches but tiny harbors; it’s not about tanning lotion and sand but olive oil and cobbles banging back and forth against old walls as if the waves wanted them down.
Some time ago, after seeing photographs of the Cinque Terre, I decided to discover whether such a place could truly exist. Although I arrived with several other travelers, I set out alone most mornings to walk the narrow and often slippery coastal path, which in places hangs precipitously above the hard surf. I would arrive in a village by lunchtime, eat, then walk farther before catching a local train back to an old villa turned into a hotel in Camogli, a settlement rightly called a town. (While one may find a few lodgings in the Cinque villages, it takes but a handful of tourists to fill them.)
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.
Manarola roused in the noon sun, and trains began the hourly disgorging of fair-weather tourists and young wanderers, one of whom ambled by and thrust a listless palm at us for a handout. Secondo said, “Cerca lavoro!” (Get work!) The kid slumped off. “Useless young. What’s he good for? He’s driftwood. He goes nowhere until the current carries him.”
I must have showed surprise at his response, because he said, “In Detroit when they called me a useless drifter I held up my violin to them, and I told them, ‘No! Here’s my rudder!’” He finished his coffee in annoyance rather than pleasure, and he said, “My father, Luca, music was his life—music was his death. He went down with a fiddle in his hand. They had to pry it loose from his fingers. Gemma, the landlady, told me Tartini’s songs were too much at his age, but I know now he knew what he was doing. Tartini was suicide.”
Secondo rose, thanked me for the cup corrected to enliven his music, and I said, “No ‘Devil’s Trill Sonata’ today.”
“No,” he said, “not today. This isn’t the day yet,” and he walked up toward the depot, and I walked down to the path along the broken shore. Somewhere farther, there had to be more fresh anchovies—impossibly, fantastically good, as if from a dream.