Green Shutters

It’s hard not to love a place whose pastime is to stand in a third floor window, the shutters tossed open, languidly gazing at the hustle of the daily happenings below. You never know what you might see from such a perch. A fisherman turned salesman, his rod traded for a calculator, hawks the catch of the day, sardines and scampi from ice buckets. Old women haggle over the just the right weight on his scale. A shopkeeper unlatches his doors and slides a postcard turnstile out to the street. A chef peruses wicker baskets of fresh produce; peppers, red onions, tomatoes, garlic, and eggplant, displayed in a kaleidoscope of bountiful heaps on the sidewalk. A uniformed busboy eases a hand truck down a flight of stairs, carrying two cases of Chianti to a restaurant cellar. A tourist attempts to frame the perfect photograph, adjusting the lens over the shadows of bed sheets and boxer shorts drying in the breeze, pinned to balconies and clotheslines with wooden clips. One smitten couple departs just as another arrives, steeling a final glance at the diamonds dancing over the sapphire ripples of the Mediterranean. This is Cinque Terre. To resist its charm is a futile exercise.

I instead surrendered myself fully, and discovered a piece of remote and rustic Italy that will linger in my mind for many years. This twenty kilometer strip of the sundrenched Italian Riviera, five hours by train from Rome, is linked together by a set of small coastal villages. The communities are carved into granite cliffs that pour down to the sea. Were they not painted in brilliant yellow, pink, and red, the dwellings would probably disappear right into the rock. Homes are stacked on each other like coins, as if there were a race to be closest to the water. Each tiny village has an even smaller marina where row boats and orange buoys bob in the waves. Weathered grape vines cling to hillside terraces that look like the stairways of giants, climbing all the way to the peaks of the surrounding mountains. A salty haze hovers over cruise ships on the horizon.

Being in Cinque Terre is like walking through the pages of a magazine. It’s like you swear you’ve been there before but never dreamt you would be able to go back. It’s new and nostalgic all at once. It’s the kind of place people go to visit and wake up five years later with bronze skin and an Italian accent.