The Cinque Terre and the surrounding lands, in particular my beloved Levanto, are obviously major summer tourist attractions, something that causes the number of residents in Levanto, for example, to swell from 6,000 in the winter to more than 20,000 in the summer, and that’s not counting the day-trippers. What […]
Cinque Terre
81 posts
As I was getting into the car today, my youngest daughter looked up at me and said in her still undeveloped manner, “Why rain?” I looked up at the sky and saw blue. There were no drops on the ground. But she was right, it sounded like rain. And so […]
I remember four years ago watching the 100 meter final and thinking “No F-ing Way, no man can win the finals that easily.” I remember then waiting around with intense anticipation for the 200 meters and for the relay, which had at that point, for me and everyone else, become […]
We were out on a traditional fishing boat recently checking out a fabulous tour of the Cinque Terre, when we got to talking fish with the boat captain, Angelo. He’s the latest in a long line of fishermen that goes back ten generations in Monterosso, so he ought to know […]
This year’s Festa del Mare in Levanto is upon us. Though there have been a few related happenings in the preceding days, the real action gets started tomorrow, Tuesday July 24, and has it’s big finish on Wednesday July 25. Those of you who have seen video of Italian Sea […]
I don’t remember the last time I was out on a pedalò, but I suspect I was just a kid, and the location was some kind of artificial lake in Connecticut or Texas or in Central Park for all I know. But I’ll admit, I wasn’t exactly bursting with […]
We spend a lot of time promoting boat tours of the Cinque Terre, but the truth is that we personally don’t do any of them. (Would you really trust the guy on the left to drive your boat?) We are neither mariners, nor navigators, nor nostromo. But we have a […]
For those who fly across oceans to visit Italy and make the Cinque Terre one of their many stops on a grueling two-week European vacation, hitting the beach is not usually on top of their list of priorities. For those who have more time to spend in Italy, coming to […]
There are two wines of importance that come from the Cinque Terre, but there is only one king: Sciachetrà, a straw wine of such goodness and scarcity that you can spent 100 bucks on a half-bottle of the stuff. The other, the crisp white Cinque Terre DOC, can be […]
When I was just a wide-eyed undergraduate doing a summer program in St. Petersburg in 1993, I spent the longest of the city’s famous White Nights in a countryside dacha, drinking heavily and speculating about Chekhov and the world. When we ran out of inane conversation topics I went out […]