Erica and I recently bought our first house, which was a surprise to us more than anyone, for when we made the decision to move permanently to the Cinque Terre area and put down roots in Levanto, we always figured that buying a house would be the last thing to […]
Levanto
Levanto is a wonderful town for families … if it weren’t, my wife and I wouldn’t have uprooted our family from Parma to move here permanently. But more importantly, Levanto is a wonderful destination for families. It has a lot to offer. Clean water with beaches that slope gently into […]
As of about a year, the City of Levanto, resident population ca. 5,500, has undertaken an experiment in becoming a zero waste municipality. This is the mark of serious change, not to mention an example for the future, because if you can get Levanto to do this, then anyone can […]
Having only moved to Liguria a couple of years ago, I have also only recently become aware of the great Ligurian artists, so many of whom come from Genoa, the most underrated city in all of Italy. These include the violinist Niccolò Paganini, the Nobel Prize winning poet Eugenio Montale […]
For a series of causes, the name of Massimo Amfiteatrof has been running across my radar a lot recently, so I wanted to let you all know about the excellent classical music festival that is held every summer in Levanto. Named after Massimo, a virtuoso cellist and longtime resident of […]
Popular legend says that Liguria has an unusually high number of nonagenarians running around. While I have never seen any statistics about this fact, casual observation seems to bear it out. Any number of the people I know in Levanto, be they friends or acquaintances, have grandfathers, grandmothers, or great-grandparents […]
They are heralded as one of the great works of mankind, the collective labor of man against nature, turning an inhospitably steep landscape into arable bits of turf on which to scratch out a living. The terraces of the Cinque Terre are one of the major highlights of visiting this […]
I saw a friend of mine on Fb complaining about the weather forecasts that seem to have kept a significant number of tourists from coming to Levanto and the Cinque Terre this long holiday weekend. His point was that the weather simply wasn’t so bad: not sunny, but warm and […]
You don’t move to the coast if you don’t like the water, and you don’t move to the Mediterranean coast if you don’t like to swim. The water is clean, blue, warm, surrounded by mountains, and its shores are populated by beautiful people. What else do you want? When I moved […]
When you own a piece of land that is part of a precious historical interchange between man and nature, you are inspired to do your best with it, even when it is a losing proposition financially and kicks your ass every time you hump up and down it trying to […]