Cinque Terre Day .5:

On our train ride from Siena to Vernazza, we met Canadians transplanted from Chicago. She went to Northwestern, he worked at University of Chicago. They were celebrating their engagement with a trip to Italy. Conversation was good, although they had not been on their trip as long as we had been, and I suspect that she was not as de-compressed as Lillie and I were, by that point.

Our train ride took us past lots of marble quarries. We could see large chunks cut out of the side of the mountains and big blocks of marble by the side of the railway. Even the most podunk train stops in this area had beautiful marble facades.

Our contact for our rental room in Vernazza was Ingrid Fenelli, a German who went backpacking in Cinque Terra decades ago, fell in love with the town and her husband Antonio, and never left.

Our room was small but nice, and right off the main street. The combo shower/toilet area was far better implemented here than it was in Rome.

Once we had gotten cleaned-up, we went out for dinner at an open-air restaurant with a view of the sea. We had yet another sullen pushy waiter, but we got a nice bottle of Cinque Terran wine. Lillie ordered pesto lasagne and I ordered shrimp.

Word to the wise for Americans ordering shrimp abroad: They cook shrimp whole. It will arrive with claws and eyes looking back at you. Having peeled and beheaded whole Gulf shrimp for Christmas dinner the year before last while watching The Aristocrats, I thought I'd be okay.

I was fine until I took the head off the wrong way and some black brain-gunk that looked like poop poured out onto the butter on my plate. Then I have to admit I kinda lost it a little bit, but not so much that anyone besides Lillie would know. I propped up one side of the plate to keep the black gunk isolated from the rest of my food and continued on with that shrimp, then switched dinners with Lillie, whose squeamishness about beef and pork somehow does not extend to seafood. Conversely, my squeamishness about seafood doesn't extend to land animals, so we are a decent match.

We followed with drinks at the Blue Marlin Bar, which - according to Rick - was the place to hang out for the young and hip. Of course, there is the only late-night bar in Vernazza, so it follows... The scene was pretty chill and my beer was okay, but Lillie reports that the toilet facilities were super-rustic (a hole in the floor) and the red wine on tap - which sounds cool, right - was chilled. Ugh. You'd think that Italians - of all people - would know better than to chill red wine as cold as that was.

On the subject of toilets.... Blue Marlin Bar was a more exaggerated example, but in general, the whole toilet experience in Italy varied widely.

Some bathrooms had useful features that might be cool to implement in the US, like 2-tier flushes (settings for "number one" and "number two") and foot-pedals to start the water, so you don't put your nasty hands on the faucet knobs.

On the other hand, other toilets lacked seats. The more public the toilet, the greater the likelihood of seatlessness. It's almost as if facilities managers throughout Italy all decided that a certain percentage of the population are pee-spraying, feces-throwing chimpanzees with bad aim/hygiene that were just going to pee all over the seats, so why increase the work for the toilet cleaner guy? To a certain extent, I get that - but it's not pleasant to try to hover while doing "more extensive work" than a pee-break.

Toilet trauma notwithstanding, we slept very well.

Cinque Terre Day One:

The skies were overcast when we woke up for our first full day in Cinque Terre. We planned to sleep in longer than we did, but it appears that the near-silence after the closing of the last bar ends with the first pealing of the church bells. Seemingly on the bell's cue, street noise gradually crescendoes to its daytime volume.

We ate breakfast at a cafe on the water, with some Australians chattering away behind us. Service was pleasant but lax, but it seemed that our waiter compensated us for his inattention by not charging for everything we ordered. Either that, or service really was disorganized and he forgot to charge us.

We both had foccaccia, which is quite a different animal in Italy than it is in the US. US foccccia is basically pizza-bread - more like bread with some herbs and sun-dried tomatoes glued-on with olive oil. The real Italian deal is more flaky than puffy/chewy, flatter, and not nearly so decorated - but more intrinsically delicious.

In general, actual Italian food is simpler, less fussy, and more about a few good ingredients than elaborate processes and combinations.

It really got me thinking about my own cooking - how my marinades almost inevitably use 12 different spices and 3 different liquids, and how - as a result - it's sort of difficult to pick out specific flavors. This is okay if you're going for a "symphonic" flavor effect, wherein all of the different ingredients/instruments create one complex flavor/sound - but it got me thinking about alternating that effect with food that's more like chamber music, where there is some blend but you can also hear/taste each part pretty distinctly.

Also, presentation and assembly are a different matter. American pizza-making is a longer, fussier process that insures even distribution of sauce, cheese, and toppings - more like like Georges Seurat's pointilism than the Van Gogh-like impasto with which Italian pizza is made. Of course, American pizza is meant to be sliced and shared - so consistency from slice-to-slice is more critical than smaller Italian pizzas intended for a single person. Both are utterly valid in my estimation, and wholly different experiences.

We bought some bread and meat and made sandwiches before we hiked up hill above Vernazza in intermittent drizzle. Owing to the same sort of holiday-weekend crowds we'd encountered in Siena, Ingrid suggested a different trail from one of those we'd thought we'd hike that day - this one heading straight up the hill, instead of along it towards one of the other four towns that comprise Cinque Terre.

Our first pause was a cemetery of sorts - more like an open-air card catalog of spaces for funerary urns. The majority of the slots had photos of the deceased. Some of these photos were apparently taken only a few years before death and others featured the deceased in their youth or middle age. I assume that it was a matter of availability of a good portrait, but it did make me wonder if I - in the same position - would want a youthful portrait or one of me in more advanced years? Surely any grandkids would find it easier to find my grave site with an older picture, but - if we were to represent my life in total - shouldn't we pick something closer to the middle?

This thought provided some conversation fodder for the trip up the mountain. The trail winds back and forth across the hill as it climbs at a moderate incline, passing by vineyards and other terraced farming.

Along the way at various turns in the trail, there were little church-shaped altars which we later realized were stations of the Cross leading up to the church at the top of the trail.

The top of the trail also featured a spring - presumably for fresh water while Vernazzans took refuge in the church from the periodic Saracen (the pre-cursors of the Turks) invasions. Here's a view of Vernazza from most of the way up there:

Wiped out from our hike, we took a nap, cleaned up, and went for dinner in Monterosso, where the diners at the adjacent table were a future Chicago Booth (University of Chicago Business School) student and his wife. We had a great conversation with them, and are now Facebook friends.

We had a great waiter - very personable and funny. I ordered frito misto (shrimp and calamari), hoping that the shrimp would be peeled this time. Nope. They just fried the shrimp whole, eyeballs and everything. Great dinner, nonetheless. We also had pesto noodles and a baked fish. We capped off dinner with sciacchetra, which is a local wine made from near-raisins.

After dinner, we checked out a small band playing English pop, rock, and blues in the courtyard nearby. Seeing as how we can hear Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" played at home by a guy without an Italian accent (not that the accent isn't cute, but...), we wandered around shops. We intended to get sciacchetra, but the prices were pretty steep for even the cheapest bottles (40 Euro), so I settled for an inexpensive bottle of limoncello.

We took the train back from Monterosso to Vernazza, and between the train and our room stopped off at Gelateria Artigianale. I had chocolate with peperoncini (chile) and Lillie ordered and got her nutella gelato before she saw the hazelnut flavor. She got over her disappointment quickly, and I enjoyed my personal favorite gelato flavor. The gelateria is in the lower left corner of this picture:

I capped off the night with a little bit of limoncello and we went to bed. The lemons may well have come off this tree, for all we know...

Vernazza Day Two:

We skipped breakfast and coffee, leaving immediately for our hike from Vernazza to Riomaggiore, packing bread, sandwiches, bananas, and figuring (1) that we'd snack a little in each town, and (2) that adding caffeine to a vigorous hike was liable to cause my heart to race.

The second prediction was prescient - the path from Vernazza to Corniglia was brutal - hot and hilly. We'd picked a beautiful day for the hike - clear blue skies and reasonable temperatures for standing around, if a smidge hot for a casual hike.

As the trails are managed by the park service, we had to buy tickets to walk them. While we were there, we bought train tickets to Florence and got as much information as we could about the train transfers we'd need to make.

We were passed by a middle-aged Korean-American woman in spandex who assured us that it was all downhill after the point where we met her. We would later see/hear her her cell phone, screaming, "Asshole! You're the one who left me!" I thought that was dramatic, funny, and inappropriate all at once - was she screaming at her ex-husband on international long distance cell roaming? We later learned, that the "asshole" was one of her travel buddies, who'd wandered off with the dog.

Our spirited Asian-American trailmate was correct about the walk getting easier - all of the other walks from town to town (Corniglia to Manarola to Riomaggiore) were much easier, and there were lots of beautiful views throughout that we could use as an excuse to pause and catch our breath. I think we took more pictures on this hike than just about anywhere else in Italy that we went. Again, I had that same cynical thought that Impressionism is easy if everything you paint already looks that way and you're slightly myopic.

On the way, we ate our sandwich lunch in a courtyard behind a gelateria in Corniglia where I bought two Italian citrus-flavored sodas, which are now my favorite sodas. Unlike American sodas, they ease up on the sugar, so the whole thing is a lot more refreshing. You can get really lemony and really limey sodas, orange sodas that don't set your teeth on edge with sugar, and - coolest of all - grapefruit soda. Delicious!

We continued on to Manarola, where we stopped for beer/wine and coffee. An Australian family was seated behind us. At least, I think they were Australian. I haven't learned to parse English, Australian, or New Zealander accents with precision. I spent some part of our walk trying to remember how Murray, one of the New Zealander characters from Flight of the Concords, pronounces a long O sound. The rest of the accent stuck, but there were certain words I can't do as Murray or any other New Zealander.

Our last stop on the hike was Riomaggiore, where we got a small snack of farinata, which is a flatbread made from chick-pea dough. It was a smidge greasy, but tasty.

Thoroughly beat, we took the train back to Vernazza. Somehow, we ended up at a different gelateria from the day before, so I could get some coffee. I think Lillie ordered some gelato and I just had some of hers. It was okay, but not as good as the other place.

We cleaned up for dinner, through a load of laundry in at the local laundromat, checked our e-mail at the local internet cafe, and wandered around town, trying to decide where to eat.

We eventually settled on what proved to be the best pizza of our whole trip. Rather than pay for table-service, we got a bottle of Cinque Terran white wine, a beer, and two pizzas (four-cheese with no red sauce, and diavola - which is basically pepperoni pizza). We ate and drank our picnic on the water with the sun setting behind us.

Not wanting to have our last impression of Vernazzan gelato be the one from this afternoon, we went back to the artisinal gelateria we first visited. Lillie got hazelnut this time, and I stuck with the chocolate with chile, because it was a winner.

Drunk, tired, and completely satisfied, we easily set in to sleep, knowing that we had an early morning the next day.

Bustling downtown Vernazza

Cool door on the walk to dinner our first night. Reminds me of one of Lillie's Window XP background themes.

We're still smiling, because we don't know how much longer we'll be walking...

Reminded me of a painting by Frolic Weymouth

Impressionism is easy.

Step One: Go to Italy.

Step Two: Take off your glasses

Step Three: Paint what you see, with myopia.

The padlocks in the foreground were left by various young lovers as a symbol of their undying love. We forgot to buy one and bring it. I am SO fired.

We were warned that Italians didn't often have dryers to go with their washing machines. We found a laundramat that had both, sparing us from having to join all these folks with our unmentionables.

We had a running joke about writing books called See Europe In Your Sweatpants or Travelling Italy By Rascal. Fact is, I think it would be tough to be overweight or disabled in Italy. As much as people eat, they walk everywhere - and it shows. Hardly any obese people around.

This is how it looks when both the camera AND the subject have been drinking.

That's my baby.

All material copyright Ethan Sellers unless otherwise indicated.