Went to Liguria a couple of weekends ago like every Milanese, and – apart from the traffic on the way back obviously – it was incredible. How often do you get to swim in the Mediterranean in mid October! Ruined my underwear, ok, because we did not plan it. But Fun.
Porto venere was really small and you feel like travelling back in time :
It is so small that there is absolutely nowhere to park your car in town. The hotel manager had to take it away from the village in a private garage. And each garage costs as much as a flat there!
Driving to Cinque Terre the day after, we learnt that there had been a rockfall a few weeks back on the coastal path linking the five villages, so it would take a long time to visit all of them. We stopped at Vernazza then, the first on our way. It had been destroyed by a massive flood exactly a year ago, in October 2011. The flood was so powerful that entire houses and cars were carried to the sea, and a year on, Vernazza was still not rebuilt. They did manage to tidy up restaurants and small hotels for tourists though, since that is what they live from basically.
We did find a small beach that was hidden from the crowd – well deserved, after a 3-hour-walk in the mountain looking for the way to get there, to finally be told by a local that we just needed to surreptitiously overstep a barrier in town centre – and manage to have a swim there too. Without any underwear even this time. What rebels we make, really. whoo
dumb French! 