5, V, Five, cinco, Cinque Terre!

This past week we had our first free weekend here in Siena. So what do a bunch of girls do with 3 free days in mid-September in Italy? Head to paradise of course! 

Benvenuto a Cinque Terre!

To arrive in the land of technicolor, Katie, Haley, Anne, and I conquered the public train system.

4 Trains and 5 hours later....we arrived in Riomaggiore, the lowest of the 5 cities.

(ok we did take a minor detour so we could make our TOURIST weekend official...here is the evidence...)

 So the Cinque Terre is a beautiful vacation spot on the west coast of Italy that consists of 5 little beach towns scattered among cliffs with a sketchy rocky pathway connecting them all. The place is famous for their magnificent views of the Mediterranean and brightly colored homes. They are also famous for their focaccia bread and pesto (my favorite!)

After arriving in Riomaggiore, we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the little town, taking in the views, and of course...swimming in the Mediterranean!

Riomaggiore is so charming. It has a cute little harbor with the locals' fishing boats and a jetty of rocks that people just lay out on like seals basking in the sunlight. It was fabulous. The Mediterranean is incredibly salty, but because the beach is large stones instead of sand, the water was incredibly blue and clear. Such a refreshing swim! (plus my family knows how I feel about getting sand in my swimsuit...)

We had dinner at a little restaurant overlooking the harbor where we stuffed our faces with pesto gnocchi.

View from our table

Gnocchi: potato dumplings with pesto and parmesan cheese

 After dinner we walked the harbor and enjoyed the views!

It was seriously one of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen! We hit the sack pretty early because we had a long day of hiking ahead of us!

We started off Saturday morning at THE BEST pastry shop in all of Italy: Panificio Rosi. We stood in there for approximately 10 minutes before deciding what to order. I decided on a round loaf of focaccia and a apricot tart. Enjoy:

 

you can tell how delicious it was by the fact that I was halfway through both of them before I remembered to take a picture...

 

apricot tart

Seriously, pure heaven in my mouth. We all ordered different things so we were able to try pieces of each others' food and let me tell you, EVERYTHING was delicious. And after trying focaccia at three different places this weekend, this was the best by far. 

After gorging ourselves on the best breakfast ever, we hit the trail. When starting the trail in Riomaggiore, you begin on the La via dell'Amore, or Way of Love.

Gate to Via dell'Amore

 Along the path, lovers lock padlocks onto anything solid they can find as a symbol of their undying love. There is also a long tunnel marked with the names and poems of lovers for years.

We of course had to leave our mark! Here we commemorated our love affair with Italy

 

At the end of the Via dell'Amore is the second city of the Cinque Terre, Manarola. This was just as adorable as Riomaggiore and had some good swim spots! But it was too early for us to want to get in the water.

The Cinque Terre is covered with olive trees and grape vines, so Italian!

Unfortunately the next part of the trail was damaged due to mudslides so we had to hop on the train to get to the next city, Corniglia.

Corniglia is not on the coast but above on the top of the cliffs and had some incredible views! But many stairs to climb...whew!

Next came Vernazza.

Here we did a little shopping, resulting in some fabulous crunchy-granola head scarves to go along with the hiking theme of the weekend, and had another fabulous meal of pesto!

Haley and I split half and half a dish of spicy spaghetti and pesto. YUM

 Then with a full stomach, we continued on to the last and hardest part of our journey to the final village of Monterosso. This hike was about an hour and a half long and consisted mostly of steep stone steps in the "jungle" of Italy, but it was beautiful! (and good exercise after a very carb-heavy weekend!)

We made it!!

Cooling off on the beach (do you like the head scarves?)

All in all, it was a weekend in paradise. Despite the hike being a combined total of about 5 hours of hard terrain wearing a backpack, the breathtaking views were well worth it! It was a nice little vacation amidst a dream-like semester!