Europe 2007                                           
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Barga

Barga is a small walled medieval hamlet of narrow streets and ancient houses. No mass tourism here though, the cute little town has managed to retain it's peaceful, tranquil atmosphere. Favoured by artists and poets, Barga has that indefinable "arty" feel to it and it's not hard to reason why inspiration for the arts is found here.

Barga rooftops

Barga town square 

The twin bells of the 13th century cathedral

Cinque Terre

The Cinque Terre are 5 villages set on the coast of the Liguria region in Northern Italy.  Again, the inspiration  for me to go there came from photography books I'd read a while back.  It's an hour or so run to get there by road but access by car to the villages is difficult. By train however it's a doddle - allegedly, because a line runs right along the coast and stops at each village in turn. but, first we have to get to La Spezia on the coast.  So with our little rucksacks we drive off to the nearest train station at Piazza al Serchio - a small village about 2 miles away from the cottage.  We arrive at the station at about 10ish and go to buy our tickets - the ticket seller speaks no English, so he gestures for us to wait and we guess he's gone to find someone who does.   A tall thin guy with a Super Mario moustache  arrives and God love him, he tries his hardest but the sum total of his English is, "Manchester United"  and "Tony Blair - gobshite".........not terribly useful for buying train tickets!  Eventually we summise that he's trying to tell us the next train to La Spezia is at 12- 45pm. There's no way on earth we're waiting nearly 3 hours for a damned train so we return to the car to drive down to Aulla & hope to get the train from there to La Spezia.  

It's a 30 odd mile run to Aulla and we arrive there around 11ish after having terrible trouble finding the bloody station. Once again we park the car and toddle off with our little rucksack to the ticket office........only to be told by a (thankfully) English speaking ticket girl that the next train to La Spezia is at 2- 45. This is now getting silly, so in the end we decide to drive directly to La Spezia to get the Cinque Terre coast train from there.

La Spezia is a big sprawling and very busy city, the sat nav has trouble mapping here so we rely on the road signs to direct us to the train station. Now - let me tell you something we learned in Italy.  Their road signs mean bugger all ! Wherever they point to has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on where you want to go. So, for instance;  you want to go to the town centre - you follow the sign, and you're guaranteed to end up in  quarry somewhere.....probably in Aberystwyth.   Like now, we've followed all the pointy signs to  the "  Stazione"  but we're lost in a maze of very narrow and steep streets.......and more worryingly we can see Genoa from here! 

To cut a long story short we eventually find the station but every parking space is taken, the place is heaving!  I'm now at the totally fed up stage and considering just calling it a day when I spot a car backing out of a space, so like a rat up a drainpipe I'm there - the car was in the space before the guy was fully out of it!  Now we have to buy a ticket - easy? ......Nah! Not a chance, we can't see a machine anywhere.  There's a girl walking towards us, so in desperation I ask if she speaks English. Turns out she's American and lives here.  She's very helpful and pops to a bloke getting out of his car to ask him where the ticket machine is. A lot of pointing and jabbering in Italian follows, then she comes back and tells me she'll walk me down to where the machine is - no wonder we couldn't find it, it was a good old walk away and buried in a load of overgrown shrubs.      

Anyway we got on the train in the end - so here are the photos we got!.......Hope they're  appreciated !

Montorosso, the northernmost village of the Cinque Terre

Near Manarola

Vernazza

Vernazza is the largest of the Cinque Terre villages

The Cinque Terre comprises the villages of - from north to south - Monterossa, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola & Riomaggiore. Unfortunately because of the faffin' about with trains and car parking etc. we didn't have the time we wanted to spend here, so we only got to go visit 3 of them, Montorosso, Vernazza and a bit of Manarola. And, we only got to do Manarola because we caught the wrong train to Vernazza and it went flying through the station without stopping.  We had to get off at Manarola and wait for a train back to Vernazza!

I suppose the hassle of the day with trains and car parks was worth it, the Cinque Terre is a lovely picturesque area but it's full of bloody tourists!  Montorosso was the worst - it was really quite crowded, but I suppose anywhere that captures Joe Public's imagination is going to be over populated during the summer months, especially costal areas. I prefer my tourism less hardcore though, but we couldn't come to this area without visiting the Cinque Terre, and it has to be said what tourism they have here is done very sympathetically to the area

I would imagine in the past this has been a beautiful unspoiled bit of coast, in fact it's also called the "Poets Gulf" because of the many poets who are attracted here for inspiration.  

Lucchio

Don't ask me what attracted us here, I really couldn't say. One minute we're following a quarry wagon along a narrow country lane, choking on the dust it's chucking up, and the next we're climbing up a battered old crumbling road to get to the little village of Lucchio - It was one of those impetuous moments you get periodically that seemed like a good idea at the time. The road here is mega steep and very narrow, I'm afraid to get too close to the right side in case it crumbles away and we go rolling down the mountainside! There hasn't been any maintenance work here for while. The road just keeps climbing and climbing, for ages and given the proven unreliability of Italian road signs I'm beginning to doubt it actually leads anywhere.  Nowhere to turn around though, so we have to keep going - up and up we go. 

After a few miles we emerge into what must be Lucchio - and we've just discovered the most useless village in the world. Who the hell would build this place & why here? It's almost inaccessible, there's no work,  just one small shop and a lot of houses stacked against the mountain top - and who would want to live here?....... Beautiful as it is........hell of a trek to the pub!

It may be a pointless place to build a village but we're glad they did! Lucchio is a
 lovely old place and the views from here are stupendous

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