Riomaggiore

An early morning swim followed by breakfast at a seafront cafe, then off to the station to buy a day’s Cinqueterre ticket.  The ticket machines are as bad as the m&m machines!  It won’t give you the option of where you want to go and many people appear to have the same problem.  Eventually we have our tickets which we must validate. This is something we keep forgetting to do so are forever jumping off trains as they are about the leave to validate.  Dot has already been threatened with a fine for not validating her ticket.  Now we had planned to take the train to each of the five villages and walk about a bit in each.  (It was way too hot to walk the whole cinque terre).  However, despite repetitive consultation of our timetable, somehow we managed to catch a straight through fast train to La Spezia…. doh!  So we caught the next one back to Riomaggiore.

This is probably the prettiest of the villages.  We had to walk through a tunnel, which was beautifully decorated with mosaics, in order to get to the town. Here we were presented with a steep main street with the pretty coloured shuttered buildings on either side.  Half way up we stopped for a rest and sat and listened to some children, a boy and a girl aged about 8 and 10 busking together with violins.  They were very good and were raking in a small fortune!

Further on we found a good place to settle under a tree for a spot of lunch.  I also wanted to do a bit of painting today and this was an ideal spot.  As my painting materialised I received many positive comments from passers by.

Dot returned from doing a little recky with cones of seafood and a small bottle of chilled local wine.  Just the thing for a wilting artist.  We  sat and enjoyed these fruits of the sea before continuing with the steep climb to the top where we were rewarded with a beautiful seaview.

We returned to Monterosso for a cool off swim before our siesta, an essential part of our day!  Later in the cool of the evening we stopped at a little cafe for a Sangria and nibbles before strolling on into the old town of Montorosso.

The evening light across the ocean was absolutely stunning this evening and the swifts were screaming about our heads.  There were so many, I even managed to capture them on camera!

This was where we had found ourselves when we arrived on the boat on the other side of the tunnel.  It was a very lively little place with many restaurants and little shops.  There were two very large churches side by side and a number of bijou houses on either side of the street divided by archways or narrow shallow stone steps.

The Brazil versus Chili penalty shoot out was going on in one of the bars and a terrific roar went up with each goal kick….. I’m not sure which side they were supporting but the Italians certainly love their football.