Cinque Terre, located on the Italian Riviera, is hands down, one of my favourite places in Europe, if not the world! The word itself is Italian for “five villages” and consists of just that! Well they’re not just any villages, but five of the most stunning, picturesque villages you’ll ever visit. These include: Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore.
Since the villages are only a few minutes apart by train, “village hopping” really easy and you can definitely visit all five in a day or pace yourself and spend days, weeks, even months there!
The easiest way of getting there is from Pisa, where a train is only an hour away and costs around 8 euros. But I’ll explain more about the practicalities concerning Cinque Terre in my next post.
And now for some photos!!
A funny thing that happened was that the night before we checked the weather forecast, it said that it was going to be warm and sunny so we had on shorts and t-shirts expecting beach weather, only to get to Cinque Terre, where it was cold and looked like it was going to pour any minute.
Luckily while we were in the tourist office getting our train schedules, they also sold some long sleeve shirts, which we ended up buying….they totally saved us from the cold since without them I don’t know how we’d manage in the freezing wind! Although I think we did look funny walking around in matching Cinque Terre shirts! (Luckily it did warm up considerably throughout the day)
Being by the ocean, there’s also lots of amazing, fresh seafood so if you’re a seafood lover like me, its hard to pass up all the great places they have to offer here. One of my favourites was at this place called Batti Batti in Vernazza, that sold an assortment of seafood in a large cone. Yummy!
Of course, you can find gelato shops everywhere too!
Anyway, here’s some more lovely photos of Cinque Terre. Some of the pics look very Italian, don’t they? (even the cat looks so Italian!)
Have you guys been to Cinque Terre? Do you have a favourite village? What did you guys love about the place?