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 3 (continued). Where Sneaker Meets Rock: The Vernazza-Corniglia Trail
I hate the responsibility of giving advice—somehow the consequences tend to accrue to the giver. We’ll never see these people again, so it’s probably safe to encourage them. “Well, take it slow. It’s grueling, but it’s worth it. We’re no athletes and it looks like we made it.” To this day I’m wondering how their hike ended. Arranging evacuation from anywhere on this trail would be nearly impossible. I try to imagine a rescue worker carrying that old man out on his back. Maybe they use EMS donkeys.
We stay chatting with the couple, happy to help them recharge for the work ahead of them, happy to rest from our labors just past. We tell them we’re celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary. They tell us they are celebrating their fiftieth. Indeed, they are from Alabama. He looks twenty years older than his wife; what did he do, marry her at age ten? Or buy her a great plastic surgeon? Good luck, Alabamans, wherever you are…
Now the trail is definitely sloping down. The winded Alabamans had just struggled up what is a nice downhill run for us. Ahead Corniglia appears as a jumble of frosting-colored blocks, little cakes of lemon, orange, and pistachio, with green shutters as a garnish. We are getting hungry.
Corniglia is the only Cinque Terre town not in a valley. Preferring safety from pirates over access to sea, the original inhabitants built on a headland. No wonder the guidebooks say to start the trail from this end. We’ve hiked 700 more feet uphill than down; those who start at this end will hike more down than up. Maybe the Alabamans will make it after all.
Gaggles of schoolchildren push past us. We reach the Corniglia trailhead where another sentinel booth shelters a teenage girl frantically checking tickets. A crowd queues up to begin their hikes. We have finished ours. We did it! And thanks to our habit of early rising, we avoided sharing the trail with a tsunami of tourists.
We have only to walk a few hundred more feet into Corniglia, and the fuel remaining in our bloodstreams might just be equal to the task. I’m quivering in every muscle, suddenly lightheaded and irritable.
We stumble up the “main street” which is about four feet wide. The moment it widens into a plaza with a restaurant, we drop into chairs under a tree and order beer and panini.
Soon the toasted sandwiches arrive, slathered with pesto and plump with slabs of fresh mozzarella, tomato, and ham. Sipping his beer, Jim says, “Now I understand how ‘restaurant’ and ‘restore’ are related. I feel tiny scaffolding in my muscles. Little workmen are climbing them, delivering the glucose for rebuilding.” As he says it, I feel it too. In Italian the two words branch from the same root, restauro.
As we undergo restoration, we watch a comedy; it is moving day for someone in Corniglia. Men are carrying household furnishings past us. A bookshelf goes by, a headboard, a matching footboard. A mattress. A sofa. Not even a wheeled hand-truck, just the workmen lugging their loads. All we see is heads, feet, and furniture.
But Corniglia does not impress us, even though we’ve heard people say it’s their favorite of the five villages. It is truly tiny, and so far above the train station that it takes three hundred steps just to come or go. We had considered looking for lodging here but now, no…
We descend those three hundred steps, catch a train back to Vernazza, and in less than a quarter hour have returned at Sergio’s apartment, to pick up our bags. Flagging—our restoration is still far from complete—we set out to find our next home.
We reboard the southbound train and debark at Manarola, the next town south of Corniglia. Yoked to our bags again, our first priority is to find lodging. As soon as we round the corner onto Manarola’s lower main street we see a sign in the window of a ceramics store—camere—rooms. Is there one for us? With the festival tomorrow, this is iffy. But yes, maybe something can be arranged… the proprietor will make a few calls. We leave our bags with him and have a look around the tiny harbor.
“Why did we book ten days of this? We’re changing rooms every night, living out of suitcases,” Jim grouches. I start spinning alternate plans—bail and head for Rome? But when we return to the ceramics store, the owner has shuffled his guests and arranged a room for two nights. He tells us his name is Paulo and shows us to a room above his store. While I shower Jim goes out and returns with farenda (a savory fried chick-pea dish) and white wine. We snack sitting on our new balcony overlooking yet another sloping main street. I feel much closer to restored.
I turn to Jim, about to say what one of us always says to the other when enjoying food or hiking, somewhere in Italy—“Fred would enjoy this, wouldn’t he?” But the words catch in my throat. Best not to bring up our worrisome family member.
Back inside we turn on the TV, catch a news program from Genoa—they are warning visitors to be wary over the holiday weekend. “With 30,000 people expected to visit the Cinque Terre, the gypsies are arriving in force. But so will be the police.” Oh boy, 30,000 guests tomorrow. There are already thousands here, flowing down the same route we took from the train station to the harbor, a new spurt every twenty minutes as each train disgorges its load.
My watch says 1:00, but my body says bedtime. To the dull roar of tourists outside the window we drift off to sleep, to wake in late afternoon and return to our balcony and finish the white wine we’ve left chilling in the bidet. Dylan Dog and the antics of passing day-trippers entertain us. Somewhere below someone is playing the theme from the Godfather on a trumpet—it is our host Paulo.
And so ends our latest inserimento. We are residents of Manarola now.
© 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 