Over the next several months, I am serializing my six-chapter travel memoir about a trip to Italy’s Cinque Terre in 2008* here. In 2010, I self-published Write Your Travel Memoirs: 5 Steps to Transform Your Travel Experiences Into Compelling Essays. It included five how-to chapters and, to provide an example, this memoir. The book is available on Amazon.com.
Meanwhile, I welcome your submissions to True Stories Well Told during my “travel memoir takeover.” Let’s fill that queue for after the series ends. See submission guidelines here.
Chapter 2 (continued). Arrival in Cinque Terre: the Challenge of Inserimento
We leave our bags in our new home and head out to find lunch, flowing with the crowd downhill. Vernazza, like each of the five Cinque Terre towns, has been built against the two sides of a ravine flanking a brook. Sometime in its history the brook was covered over so what were once merely sidewalks down both sides became a paved street broadening and slanting to the west. In Vernazza (as we’ll discover in other villages we visit) that sloping main street terminates in a plaza and a port of sorts. With seas too rough and terrain too steep for harbor berths, the fishermen use a gantry system to raise boats from the waterfront into the plaza where they drop them onto wheeled frames, then roll them home to park outside their doorways.
Thousands of day-trippers are pouring in. Boats already crowd the main street. It’s a canyon four stories deep, walled with pastel stucco buildings accented with grids of green window shutters. A cacophony of crowd noise echoes around us. High-pitched children’s squeals and a toy-train whistle rise above the roar.
We shuffle shoulder to shoulder toward the plaza surrounded by people descending from the train station. Even more people are spurting out of cracks between the buildings. I spot the white/red paint slashes that are the markings of the C.A.I. trails (Club Alpino Italiano) this area is famous for. Hikers who began the day in villages north or south of Vernazza are arriving, just in time for lunch.
We decide rather than fight them for a restaurant table, we will picnic. We buy arancini (deep-fried rice balled around morsels of cheese or meat) and squid salad, then claim seats on a bench by the railing that separates the plaza from the drop to the little harbor below.
From the crowds and merriment, you would think this was the festival day already. The student groups are chattering. A saxophonist is playing for tips. A national news crew is doing a “first beautiful day of Spring” story, stopping people for interviews. I overhear someone say this is the first day the sun has shown in over a month.
Ordinarily Jim and I hate crowds; we dislike finding that we have chosen the same thing at the same time thousands of others have. It offends our sense of ourselves as special, apart (and no doubt better) than the masses. Can we control our knee-jerk reaction? To arrive at noon in a place awash in its maximum capacity of day-trippers is to risk feeling alienated.
Here is where our inserimento will go well or badly, which will inflect the rest of our trip. Here in Vernazza the story-in-progress is mass delirium generated by unaccustomed warmth, sun, and scenery. In addition to the school groups there are couples and families who woke finally to a promise of Spring in the air and blew off whatever responsibilities to head for the Cinque Terre for the day… and who could blame them. The universal festival mood affects us too. We feel at home, and find we don’t really mind our thousands of guests.
Jim and I finish our lunch, then a gelato, then head back to our little apartment. Jim goes out again for a bottle of white wine, and I go out to check email at the Internet café.
I don’t believe in incessant email-checking while on vacation, but I have subcontracted a lot of work while I am away. I have been offline three days, and fear questions are piling up. And of course there is the question of how Fred is doing.
At the Internet café I find that all is okay with my work, but there is no word from the house-sitters. This worries me. Where is the chipper “we’re all fine” message? Maybe an anecdote to amuse and reassure us? Am I just being a sentimental pet-owner?
Our Cinque Terre inserimento ends with us on our terrace high above the crowds in the street, reading our Dylan Dogs and growing drowsy from the sun and wine. I let my eyes drift shut and listen to the sound of diners becoming shoppers in the street below. Evening should be lovely once the day-trippers leave…
I try not to think about what no news from home might mean. To not think comes easily high on an Italian terrace in warm sun.
© 2024 Sarah White
*I self-published Write Your Travel Memoirs mainly as an experiment to test the print-on-demand workflow before offering it to my clients. I had the content, from workshops I had taught for Story Circle Network’s online classes, and enjoyed adapting it to book form.
True Stories Well Told 