Monterosso in Mid-March
A train ride, a hike, and a man selling oranges. Snapshots of a journey through Cinque Terre, Italy.
The train from Rome to La Spezia is about four hours long, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have a direct route, one that doesn’t make you transfer in Florence or Pisa. Today, we are lucky.
Claire and I sit in a car that’s about half-full, and the two seats across from us are empty. I always enjoy long train rides like these — “always,” as in, during the two months I’ve been here. There’s a lot of talk about how unreliable, how under-resourced Italian transit is, and most of it is spot on. I’m sure that if I were commuting to and from Rome or venturing out on business, I’d dread a train like I do the dentist. But in this weird perennial vacation of mine, I look forward to the novelty of a long ride. A much smoother and quieter ride than an airplane (if you’re in a car without Italian teenagers). A place where I can read my book, sleep, and read some more. And, this time, I have Claire along for the ride, too.
We left Rome about an hour ago. In La Spezia, we’ll trade this train for a small local one to Monterosso, which is just a little further north along the water. Our intercity train (maximum velocity: 35 mph) trolls alongside the western coast of Italy. Out the window to our left, the shore juts toward us and rapidly recedes. This train runs practically a straight line (at a north-west angle), but our distance from the sea is constantly changing.
Look at a map of Italy and try to trace your finger up the left side of the boot, from the heel to the calf. You’ll quickly discover an erratic landscape. It curves, expands, and draws back again. It fans off in every direction and can’t make up its mind. The result, on the ground, is a coastline that’s always changing.
Through another empty row of seats, the window to our right shows an eastern view that’s also in flux. If it’s there’s mountains now, it’ll be flat in five minutes. Outhouses at one glance, seaside condominiums on the next. We pass vineyards at the feet of jagged hills and bright yellow canola crops blooming and blowing in the wind.
It’s a clear day in mid-March. The sun is bearing its way through the windows on the left side of the train, reflecting off the Mediterranean and perfectly into our eyes. We’re less than halfway into our journey and the car is already baking. Thankfully, Claire and I aren’t Italians, which means we have no problem discarding our heavy winter coats (it’s sunny and 55°F today) and actually being comfortable. She fans herself with her t-shirt as I roll up the sleeves of my blue button-down. A woman two rows in front of us adjusts her scarf.
The Tuesday morning train to La Spezia, and from there to Cinque Terre, is all but empty in the off-season. A roaring bus ride, crowded as always, schlepped us to Roma Termini earlier this morning. We stepped onto the train ten minutes before departure and were welcomed by a completely empty car. A clean, quiet place to sit in Rome—we felt like royalty, Italian teenagers be damned.
But now, the ticket inspector is making his way into our car. As he wrestles with a clumsy sliding door, I start going over the script in my head. He’ll say ‘good morning.’ I’ll say ‘good morning.’ He’ll ask to scan our tickets. I’ll show him our tickets. But! Both of the tickets are on my phone. Will he see this? I should have printed them. In any case, remember: i due biglietti, eccoli. Good enough.
As I practice changing from one ticket to the other on my phone, Claire stretches and turns up the volume on her earphones. She highlights a passage in her reading, something for her creative nonfiction class back at school, and turns the page.
Suddenly, he’s here, breathing through his mouth and directly above me. He says ‘good-morning’ and motions at the ticket-scanner in his left hand. I mumble my rehearsed greeting (get the inflection right next time) and hand him my phone. I barely look at his face, but I can smell his breath just fine from here. I crane my neck upward and, suddenly, I’m staring at his hands.
They’re enormous. Enormous and calloused, not the kind of hands you’d expect from a man who scans tickets and lectures i turisti about validating their tickets before they board the train. His hands tell of some past or double life, unknown and barely detected by an outsider like me. Nuance has been hard to come by lately, especially in fleeting interactions where I struggle to understand the words themselves, much less the human who’s speaking them. But, for a second, I know these hands. They’re an expression come to life, one I’ve only recently learned. These hands are rubate all’agricoltura, stolen from the fields.
He brings my phone close to his face and squints at it, like he’s inspecting a newborn chick. Likewise, he holds it as if it really were something delicate, cupping it gently in his left hand as his right one applies a few smudgy taps and scrolls. He hands it back and drags his feet toward the next passengers.
I’m instantly grateful — he didn’t veer off script. No questions in Italian about our destination, no confusion with the tickets, no small talk about the weather (fa brutto to him, I’m sure). But again I feel silly for having to rehearse such a simple interaction. Claire makes another note in her reading and looks toward the sea.
It’s important, somehow, that I manufacture these anxieties.
Eavesdropping at the bar and learning nothing. Reading museum plaques and trying not to look at the English (which is, without fail, always there to bail me out). Replaying old conversations in my head, conversations that end with a resigned sto imparando, ma lentemento from me (“I’m learning, albeit, slowly”) and a compassionate smile from someone who’s at least trilingual.
This kind of overthinking is a ritual I can’t give up, often at the expense of actually enjoy myself in this country. But slowly, it’s all starting to feel a little less important now that Claire is in Italy and we are on a train toward La Spezia and Cinque Terre. She sets down her reading, kisses the prickly half-beard on my cheek, joins her hands to her lap and rests her eyes.
We connect in La Spezia and wait about twenty minutes to board our next train, which is visibly older and more endearing than the one we arrived in. It’s made up of a collection of blue-green rusting cars, maybe seven or eight in total. Not polished or sleek like the time-bending bullet between Rome and Florence. This train is boxy, like an old bus whose tires were replaced with rail wheels. Claire and I board and take our pick of the pink plastic seats. The train leaves seven minutes late. We don’t mind.
Cinque Terre (“The Five Lands,” translated literally) is a string of picturesque Italian towns along the coast. On a map, this stretch of the coast (called Liguria) is in the upper-left portion of the boot, right as it begins to fan outward and lose its shape. These five towns each nuzzle into their own little inlets and climb the ragged hills behind them. They’re all in close succession, which means our train from La Spezia is stopping at each town. Our destination is Monterosso, the northernmost and ‘largest’ of the Five Lands, with a population of less than fifteen-hundred.
Dusk is closing in, and out the window to our left we watch as the sun sets over Manarola, then Corniglia and Riomaggiore, and then Vernazza. The train runs through the cliffs and passes through a series of tunnels. We pass white waves as they wash over rocks and cliffs in the golden pink light. It’s gorgeous, and I try not to think about how many tons of dynamite it took to make this short passage possible. When we arrive in Monterosso, the fifth and final town, the sun is gone and a deep-blue darkness spreads across the sky like an ink blot.
We walk from the train station toward a little apartment, one that we (mostly Claire) had researched and booked a few months ago. It’s cold and completely dark now, and taking a look around we see that we’ll have to take our pick of the three restaurants still open in the off-season. I carry my duffle bag and Claire rolls her compact suitcase across concrete and cobblestone. A few months from now, the clumsy hum of rolling suitcases and face-in-phone meandering toward an Airbnb will be background noise, omnipresent and indistinct. But tonight, it seems like we’re the only ones arriving in a cold and quiet Monterosso.
We walk deeper into the low-lit town, and at the top of about fifty concrete steps we manage to find our apartment. It’s unlocked. The owner, who we’ll never meet, has left a set of ancient keys on the kitchen table alongside a Rick Steves guide to Cinque Terre and a business card of a breakfast restaurant, presumably one she recommends. The kitchen, which doubles as a living room with its two sleeper sofas, leads to a patio with tall trench-like walls on all sides. Back inside, the bedroom is through a set of French doors that are mostly for show. I spend a few stubborn minutes trying to get them to close. Claire tells me, kindly, to stop it. We’re both tired and hungry.
Less than an hour later, we’ve stuffed ourselves on pesto at an overpriced restaurant near the beach and are waiting for the check. After we pay, we walk a pair of cigarettes back to our apartment. The moon is buried under layers of terraced clouds, making it impossible to get a proper glimpse of the sea and cliffs. Even with its occasional yellow streetlights, a sleeping Monterosso is hiding from us. We’re tired and resign to discovering the town in the morning. Back at the apartment, I make sure to turn the radiator on before we collapse into bed.
W e wake up to the light, which is already very bright, a signal for us to start our relatively unplanned day with cappuccini and cornetti con pistacchio. We sit on a bench outside an old café that sells wine and craft beer. The owner, a nice older man who indulged me as I ordered in grammar-school Italian, sweeps a few leaves from his threshold with a frayed straw broom. For owners of small Italian shops, it’s imperative that they tend constantly to their entryways (le soglie) with these antique brooms. Even outside the cheap mini-marts of Rome, proud owners sweep away puddles of rainwater from their solgie, only to have the uneven cobblestone bring in more water just minutes later.
I’ve brought along the Rick Steves booklet for some reason. I flip through it during breakfast and land on Monterosso, for which he praises for its having “Cinque Terre’s best beaches, swimming, and nightlife” — amenities that aren’t exactly friendly to our weekday visit in mid-March. A hike, however, on this clear windy day sounds delightful.
There’s a well-known path that starts in Monterosso and snakes its way south through each of the Five Lands. We decide that a two-hour journey to the next closest town, Vernazza, is plenty. First, though, we walk along a steep staircase path toward that drops us at the foot of St. Francis. A bronze portrait of the monk, who’s conversing with a dog, of course, punctuates a lookout of Monterosso to our left and the sea to our right: some mix of the Tyrrhenian and Balearic. There’s almost no point in describing the water, so perfectly blue and striking that it’s practically its own cliché.
We walk down to a boardwalk that runs parallel to the beach, which we are happy to see in shining daylight now. Again, we stop at the water and stare for a while, tossing in a few rocks and then continuing on. The boardwalk drops us at the door of a hotel with shuddered bamboo gates: closed this time of year. To our right we obey a wooden sign that points towards ‘VERNAZZA’ handwritten in chipping white paint.
The path immediately starts with a steep set of slab-stone stairs: a good precursor for what’s to come. The train between these two towns takes about three minutes. Its journey, unlike ours, isn’t a vertical one. But after we’ve conquered our third set of stairs, we’re met kindly by a winding dirt path that runs slightly downhill. There’s a vineyard to our left where the path drops off, and a small tan man is lacing thick wire around several empty bamboo poles. On the steep slope, he works carefully, not quickly. In his focus, he pays no attention to tourist-hikers like us. There’s work to be done, even up here in the hills. He’s likely priming his field for the next season of Sciacchetrà, a sweet golden wine that grows best in rough, elevated terrain.
We stop at a clearing in the trees, which even in March are already dense with leaves and drooping onto the path. From this height, the water looks like a pallet of unmixed paint, deep tones of blue further out and blobs of foamy green closer to the shore. We take our time with this hike, stepping aside twice to let other couples go ahead along the narrow path.
Further along the Cinque Terre coastline, between Riomaggiore and Manarola, there’s a similar hiking trail called the Via dell’amore, The Way of Love. Every online guide — and probably Rick Steves, too— hedge their praise of The Way of Love with cryptic warnings of how tourist-ridden the path becomes in the summer months. Perhaps because these same publications encourage tourists to go there in the first place.
But today, we’re happy to enjoy the sun and salty breeze as we round yet another inlet, following an abandoned path that takes us whatever direction it pleases. Around a blind turn, a vendor comes into view. He’s in a hollowed-out little space beside the path. Instinctively, I expect a “hullo my-friends, where our-you frome?” like the ornery street jockeys in Rome.
We walk closer, and I realize he’s not selling cellphone chargers or bracelets or burnt chestnuts. He’s selling oranges, oranges in old wooden crates, laid in rows and stacked atop a small patch of grass. He’s staring out at the sea with a blank and calm expression. He’s an old man with an unkempt beard and leathery skin. A straw hat, despite the strong wind, remains fixed to his balding head. Whatever hair he does have is dancing in wild white-grey strands around his forehead and behind his ears. He gives a squinting smile in our direction as we walk by, but his eyes are fixed on the water and horizon.
It’s moments like these that are always oddly familiar to me, intrinsically human. And they’re everywhere in this country.
Buying flowers from a shop-owner in a three-piece suit. Watching old, round men thump a soccer ball at dusk, their shouts of Gioca! (“Play on!”) ringing through the park well past dinner time. Walking home and seeing a pair of hands reach out the window above to change the laundry.
In the end, all I can keep are snapshots. I’ll gather these flashes and lay them over one another like old film clippings, setting each one upon the backdrop of countless others.
We eventually stop in front of another set of stairs and look behind us at the sea. I take Claire’s hand and kiss it twice, happy to be with her on a walk from Monterosso to Vernazza — no doubt another snapshot. I’m learning to collect as many as I can.
Learning, albeit, slowly.
