La Spezia and Cinque Terre
Trip Start
Apr 20, 2007
1
9
17
Trip End
May 28, 2007
La Spezia, Italy
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
We walked the longest trail first, it took about 2 hours and basically is straight up for the first hour and mostly steps - very hard in the heat. The village we came to - Vernazza was probably the best of the five villages (I am writing this from Verona so we have now done all the four sections of trails between teh villages).
The other find was a restaurant in La Spezia called Pomodoro (tomato) which does great pizza. My favourite was ham, mushroom and cream. They also have a litre of wine for 6 euros. And its good stuff. It is a real local place so its good for people watching. Go left out of the La Spezia train station, a down to the first side road and it is right on that corner. There is also a Pomodoro in the train station but it is a completely different place.
We stayed at La Spezia Centrale B&B - this was a good place to stay becuase it was so close to teh train statoin (and we were mainly in La Spezia to go to Cinque Terre). The one bad thing was that it was a converted apartment so it only had one bathroom (there are three rooms for guests). It was reasonably easy to find (there is a sign on the railing opposite the Pomodoro restaurant) but once you know where it is, it is actually quicker to get to it by going to the second to last set of platforms, walking to the end of the platform and then crossing the last two tracks. There is a specifc gap in the yellow lines in this area so we don't think it is against the rules to cross there.
We also took a trip down to Lerici which is at the head of the La Spezia harbour. It has a fort/museum mainly focusing on the prehistory of the Italian Peninsula with a range of animals from giant bears from 10,000 years ago to dinosaurs. The town itself was sleepy but I think it is exclusive real estate as the shopping and food and drink was definitely city prices (unlike La Spezia which is a port/navy town with).
