Thursday, October 23 - Levanto and Cinque Terre

Monday morning, after a quick day and two nights in Venice we caught the train back up to Milan and then across to the opposite coast to Levanto, the town just to the north of the famed Cinque Terre village/towns. We stayed at L'Erba Persa, an agriturisimo (B&B run by a local farmer/family.) We unfortunately had failed to print our our reservation confirmation or a map – even a phone number of our home for the next four days. Fortunately there was a map at the station with it marked on it, so I set out in what turned out to be the right direction and soon enough found Claudio the farmer of the home who quickly hopped in his car with me and returned to the station to pick Andrea and the bags up.

So this place is grand – a large 18th century not quite in its prime anymore typical italian nobility house. Not sure how else to describe it. Claudio lives here along with his wife Grazia and two kids, Sirio and Fiamma and 18 cats, a handful of dogs, couple donkeys/burros, one horse, 28 hens – currently on strike and not laying. The grounds are expansive with greenhouses, vegetable gardens with which he supplies local restaurants and 500 olive trees. Duncan has found his happy place. As soon as I started exploring, Claudio showed me his 18 different kinds of mimosa/acacia trees in the grounds. On Tuesday I found him washing olives in a greenhouse and he immediately asked if I wanted to go see one of the olive presses in town. Olive harvest is in full swing at the moment. He hopes to get 5-6000 liters of olive oil from his 500 trees this year. Yesterday he told me, that he was hoping to pick 500 kilos of olives as he had booked the press for today. I went and helped for about an hour shaking the olives off a branch either with a long bamboo pole or picking them by hand. I maybe supplied a kilo or two! This is hard work.

Levanto is very much a real town, bigger than the more tourist driven Cinque Terre five. We have wandered around, sat on the beach, ate gelato, had a wonderful meal Monday night that friends Dave Hillis and Kris Rocke would have been rightly proud of. Mmmm! So good! Wednesday we started the hike from the northern most CT town to the next one and quickly realized we didn't have the oomph to walk the entire trail to the last one (7miles total) so we caught the train on the next leg and walked the final two legs which are much more flat. Pretty spectacular coastal scenery.


Duncan