At some point last year we got an REI Adventures brochure in the mail and flipped through it, dreaming about all the crazy places in the world there are to explore. One in particular caught Stephanie’s eye, Cinque Terre, which she’d heard about before. Given its close proximity to Nice, she started thinking about going on an Italian vacation within our then-upcoming French vacation.

Cinque Terre means five lands (or villages), referring to the five towns built into the hillsides along the northern Italian coastline. The area around and including the villages are a national park, an ecological preserve, and a world heritage site. They’re also a major tourist destination. Even though there were a lot of non-native people around, and a lot of English being spoken, I got the sense that there was still a strong local culture, and that the national park organization was dedicated to preserving that.

The five villages are connected by a mostly underground railway and a series of hiking trails along the coast and in the terraced hillsides above the villages. Here’s a map that shows the five villages connected by a network of trails.

On Tuesday we woke up fairly early in Riomaggiore and prepared to hike north along the coast. The 8.50€ daily pass enabled us to hike the trail and take the train as much as we wanted. This was great because it meant at any one of the villages we could choose to get off the trail and take the train instead.

Stephanie’s mom hiked with us all the way to Corniglia, the middle of the 5 villages, which was only accessible from the trail by climbing up a series of switchbacks with 382 steps! We stopped there for lunch, gorging on pasta and having the best tiramisu of my life.

At that point, Stephanie’s mom stayed behind to explore the town and then take the train back to our apartment, while Stephanie and I continued on to one more village, Vernazza. That last leg was pretty long and hot, so we decided to hop on the train back to Riomaggiore to get some Mediterranean swimming in.

That night we had another nice dinner together, and then on Wednesday we packed our things up, did a little bit of shopping, and then hit road back to Nice. On the way, I counted the tunnels between Cinque Terre and Nice: there were around 175!