Cinque Terre among pastel colours and the smell of deep-frying. This is a story from when we visited Cinque Terre in the summer of 2022. It was close to dreadful, but we will definitely return another time, in another season.
Cinque Terre is one of those places you almost feel you’ve visited before you even arrive. You see the five small towns everywhere—photos, posters, Instagram—those beautifully coloured houses leaning just so towards the coast and the green-blue sea, and apparently never a single person getting in the photographer’s way.
And let me begin by underlining that it IS beautiful. Of course it is. There’s a reason Cinque Terre sits on UNESCO’s World Heritage list—but success has a backside, and that’s what I’m trying to describe here. Then it’s up to you whether Cinque Terre in summer is your sort of thing, or whether your visit belongs in another season.
Cinque Terre is exactly as beautiful as the photos
Cinque Terre is an entirely fantastic area, and the five towns—Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare—are every bit as absurdly photogenic as you imagine at home.
We came to photograph, naturally. That’s what we do. We travel, look at places, take far too many pictures, and hope a few of them later become something that works on a wall. So we can hardly stand in a corner pretending innocence, shaking our heads at all the other people with cameras and phones who arrived with precisely the same plan.
The popularity makes perfect sense.
Because it is exactly all that beauty that has created the sea of people, the souvenir shops, the fast bars and the constant smell of frying oil—which in turn pushes the Italy you came for further and further away.
Cinque Terre did not become popular by accident. It became popular because it is unique, and the success is now so overwhelming that it can make that uniqueness hard to spot behind all the people standing in front of it.
A useful tip – leave the car somewhere else
We had a car. We almost always do, and when you’re used to driving around Italy, it’s easy to assume a car solves most things—even in places where, hundreds of years ago, Italians built towns on near-vertical cliffs.
There are parking spaces up top, at the entrances to the towns, but don’t expect to drive from town to town in Cinque Terre and find somewhere to park.
Park in La Spezia, for example, and take the train. It works. Get up early and head out before everyone else who read the same good advice. Near the station there’s a parking garage, but you’ll need to be quick off the mark—it fills up fast.
at 9:40 we were third in line
It’s not enough to have abandoned the idea of parking in Cinque Terre itself. You also need to be quicker than everyone else who abandoned it. There are, however, several long-term parking options in La Spezia, and we saw multiple places with free spaces even later in the day—they’re just a bit further from the station.
The train links the five towns to the outside world and makes it easy and practical to get through the entire area in a day.
Via dell’Amore was closed, so we went over the mountains
One of the best-known experiences in Cinque Terre is Via dell’Amore, the “Path of Love” between Riomaggiore and Manarola. A relatively short and accessible trail along the cliffs, with sea views and the option of holding hands, if you’re into that sort of thing.
It was under renovation when we were there—which we’d already discovered—so we planned a slightly alternative walk, which was, in truth, more of a hike. It involved a rather spirited bus ride from Manarola to Volastra, and from there it was simply a matter of walking to Corniglia.
It was a long walk—and a hot one—but absolutely worth the effort. The path took us through vineyards on terraced slopes and gave us a sweeping view across large parts of Cinque Terre at once. And there weren’t many others with the same idea, so we more or less had the trail to ourselves.
Five towns and very little space
Down in the towns, however, there are people. A lot of people.
It’s not a matter of a slightly busy main street or waiting a bit for a table. The narrow streets simply weren’t built for the volumes moving through them in summer, so you end up in a slow current where everyone tries to experience spontaneous Italian charm in the order they’re allowed through.
You can still find small moments. A window. A staircase. An old façade where the paint has given up covering everything. Laundry strung between houses. A glimpse of the water where the light hits exactly as you hoped.
Then someone steps in front of it.
It’s a slightly bizarre scene. Locals—because people do actually live here—mixed with sunbathing holidaymakers, mixed again with day-trippers spending their time walking in single file along the narrow paths and streets.
This shouldn’t sound like we don’t understand it. We were there too. We had cameras, and we walked around looking for the same spots everyone else had seen in photos. It’s always easy to be annoyed with tourists when you prefer to think of yourself as a traveller, but the difference is rarely bigger than one having a camera over their shoulder while the other holds up a phone.
It doesn’t change the fact that the crowds take something from the experience. The five towns are still beautiful, but they’re not given much room to be.
The Italian charm was in a hurry
We’ve spent enough time in Italy to know the difference between a bar where you’re welcomed and one where you’re processed. In Cinque Terre, you’re mostly processed.
An unusual amount of very good English is spoken in many places. You could see it as a sign of international outlook and helpfulness, but the truth is probably simpler. English is spoken well because it pays.
It’s not conversational English. It’s turnover English.
You choose something, pay, and preferably get seated or moved along so the next person can step up. Service is often brisk—not necessarily unpleasant, just shaped by that particular efficiency that develops when a person is no longer a person but table number seven that needs turning quickly.
The famous Italian warmth—where you chat a little about the food, the weather, the town or life itself—is under pressure on days like this.
This is not quite Italy. It is a place in Italy that, on its worst days, feels a little too much like a theme park.
The paper cone from hell
And then there were those paper cones of deep-fried fish.
On paper, it sounds perfect. You’re standing by the Mediterranean in a small old fishing village, the sun is shining, and you buy a cone filled with prawns, squid and bits of fish you can eat with your fingers while looking out over the water. It should be difficult to get wrong.
It wasn’t.
I learned to hate the cone before we were done. Everything was drenched in frying oil—even what had probably once been a prawn—and as we moved through the towns, the smell from the fryers hung as an extra layer over the sea air, until you weren’t quite sure whether you’d arrived at an Italian coastal town or were standing behind a travelling fish van in a Danish car park.
The fish was unlikely to have been pulled from the sea just below the town that morning. It may well have been perfectly fine and caught by very capable people somewhere, but after a trip through the fryer, it all tasted more or less the same—which is probably the point if it has to be served quickly enough to the next few thousand people.
Somewhat odd in a region where almost any restaurant can effortlessly produce a plate of beautifully crisp fritto misto.
The beauty doesn’t quite disappear
And yet something kept pulling us back.
You turn a corner in Manarola and see the houses stacked in colours that shouldn’t work together, but do. You see Vernazza from an angle where the town opens towards the water. You stand high on the trail watching the railway vanish into the cliffs while the sea fills everything else, and suddenly it hardly matters that twenty minutes earlier you were queueing for a lukewarm beer, served by a man who made it clear you weren’t the most interesting guest of his day.
That may be exactly why Cinque Terre is so difficult to settle in your own mind. The place lives up to the images, while the experience sometimes doesn’t. The beauty is always there, but you have to work harder than expected to be alone with it.
Cinque Terre is easy to recommend. It would be foolish not to.
We’ll return when everyone else has gone home
We spend a fair amount of time in Italy, so we have the option of returning at another time of year—and we will. Whether it’s spring, autumn or winter, we don’t yet know, but we’ll be back.
It may turn out that half the places are closed, the weather is grey, and the quiet streets we dream of feel more empty than charming. We once drove 1,700 kilometres to photograph lavender fields that had been harvested the day before, so it wouldn’t exactly be the first time reality chose a different solution than the one we had in mind.
But we’re convinced Cinque Terre deserves another chance.
