{"id":647,"date":"2014-09-20T21:30:57","date_gmt":"2014-09-20T21:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aweewalk.com\/?p=647"},"modified":"2018-05-27T03:04:28","modified_gmt":"2018-05-27T03:04:28","slug":"italy-by-kayak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/?p=647","title":{"rendered":"Italy, by kayak"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s no getting around it. \u00a0Sometimes one person’s misfortune can produce another person’s vacation. \u00a0(I won’t say good fortune.) \u00a0That’s what happened to me.<\/p>\n

Bob M, my cousin-by-marriage–it’s a relationship of love, not blood–suffered a partial retinal detachment about five weeks ago. \u00a0This frightening event forced him and his wife to cancel their plan to go on a guided kayak tour of the Ligurian Coast and Sardinia, in Italy. \u00a0Bob’s treatment prohibited air travel, and his arc of recovery after surgery was uncertain.<\/p>\n

He can now fly safely, and I am happy to report his eyesight is improving and the treatment appears successful. \u00a0Nevertheless, he and his wife decided a while ago to cancel the trip. \u00a0They made the decision too late to get a refund. \u00a0They looked around for a couple to take their place. \u00a0Not finding one, they offered a place to me. \u00a0This was a generous and entirely unexpected gift, for which I am very grateful. \u00a0So I’m taking in the sights for three.<\/p>\n

Getting here, however, proved more difficult than expected, which given my travel karma should not have been unexpected.<\/p>\n

I took the light rail from the bottom of the hill to Penn Station, where I planned to take a train to the airport. \u00a0The next one leaving was a pricy Acela, so I took a cab instead. \u00a0The entrance to the airport from the Baltimore-Washington Parkway was blocked by a police car. \u00a0The cab driver exited onto Interstate 95 North, drove almost back to the city before using an “Official Use Only” crossover to head south again. \u00a0We got to the airport by a different approach; it was $15 more than the Acela fare.<\/p>\n

The route was Baltimore-Atlanta-Paris-Genoa. \u00a0The first leg was uneventful. \u00a0But after boarding the flight to Paris in Atlanta we sat on the runway for an hour. \u00a0The pilot eventually got on the intercom and apologetically said the aircraft wasn’t mechanically ready to fly to Europe. \u00a0The groans were notably low decibel. \u00a0People don’t mind getting off an airplane they’re told it may not make it to the destination.<\/p>\n

Another plane was found–does every airport have a hangar of spares?–and took off at three in the morning. \u00a0That was too late for me to make the connection in Paris to Genoa, so I wasn’t on it. \u00a0The next available flight was at four in the afternoon. \u00a0So I would miss the gathering of the group–that much was certain.<\/p>\n

I spent the night in an airport hotel that seemed about a county away. \u00a0The flight took off on time the next day, headed to Rome, not Paris. \u00a0Soon it was time to sleep again.<\/p>\n

In Rome we disgorged and unaccountably had to go through security (where could we have picked up scissors and bombs?) before going to passport control. \u00a0I had only an hour to make my connection, and I didn’t. \u00a0So caught the noon flight to Genoa, caught a cab to Principe train station and found myself here.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I carried an elderly couple’s bags up the stairs to the platform. \u00a0This proved to be a \u00a0valuable deposit in the karma bank.<\/p>\n

I changed trains at Sestre Levante and got on the local to the Cinque Terre as the door shut behind me. \u00a0The stations weren’t announced and there was no route diagram in the train car. \u00a0Luckily, I didn’t fall asleep. \u00a0I managed to get off at Corniglia, the third of the five villages.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The station is on the edge of a steep slope; there’s nothing below it but stone and water. \u00a0The sun was bright and tourists were arriving and departing, many with trekking poles. \u00a0A sign announcing Corniglia (and the rest of Cinque Terre) as a UNESCO World Heritage Site said the village was 350 steps up the hill and also accessible by a 2-euro van. \u00a0I chose the latter.<\/p>\n

The van deposited me a hundred yards from a hotel and restaurant where I was greeted by Daniele Ratto, the trip’s driver, humper of luggage, interpreter of local ways.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This was the view.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Corniglia has a small square with a large church and bell tower. \u00a0There’s also a chapel, also with bells, and another church at the top of the ridge a half-mile or so up. \u00a0The entire village is in an unlikely place, as (we will soon see) are its four sisters. \u00a0It’s on a slope of dense vegetation, scrubby trees, granite ledge, friable rock and thin soil. \u00a0The grade is so steep that it would require clambering on all fours in many places. \u00a0Building houses and farming would seem very far down the list of recommended activities.<\/p>\n

But of course that’s what makes it such an amazing place.<\/p>\n

A road–really an alley, navigable only by three-wheel delivery trucks–went off the square into the town. \u00a0The houses are like ones I’ve seen in other old European cities but that I’ve never seen in an American one. \u00a0It is hard to determine where one begins and the other ends; they appear to be part of one big simultaneously built structure that was then subdivided. \u00a0Undoubtedly that’s now how it happened. \u00a0But it has a mysterious unity and permanence, almost as if it had been excavated from the rock itself.<\/p>\n

I’d love to get inside one, and I’d love to know how water, sewerage, electricity and gas were added. \u00a0But the only views possible are the clothing, wine and gelato emporiums that line the road.<\/p>\n

The group was out on the water. They started from Monterosso, two towns to the north and were heading to Corniglia. All the outings are day trips. The nights are spent in hotels, and the meals (except for an occasional picnic) are taken in restaurants. Some of the expeditions of Tofino Expeditions are camping trips. \u00a0But not this one.<\/p>\n

I put my stuff in the hotel room and walked into town. I took a stairway off the alley and climbed it until it leveled off into a passageway between front doors and the gates to back yards. The end of the summer vegetable season was on display in the back gardens\u2014plum tomatoes hanging from staked vines, tan crookneck squash, greens.<\/p>\n

The path led to a cemetery of crypts made of concrete, faced with marble and stacked eight high. Many had photographs of the deceased in oval brass frames. The earliest birth dates were from the 1830s. One that caught my eye was Gaetano Andreani Castagneto (1841-1932) who was (in Italian) \u201ca veteran of the war of secession of the United States,\u201d as well as a \u201ccapo squadron della MUSN.\u201d No mention of which side he was on, but if MUSN referred to the Marines of the U.S. Navy, then it was the Union.<\/p>\n

There was no obvious clustering of deaths during the influenza epidemic of 1918-19.<\/p>\n

I walked back down to the main alley. As I was heading deeper into town I looked up and saw Jim Bean and behind him, Ellen, my sister, who were coming up from the landing and swimming spot at the foot of the slope, hundreds of feet down. They suggested I go for a swim.<\/p>\n

I took the suggestion. The ancient stone path descended in switchbacks, protected in places by modern handrails. It\u2019s hard to imagine carrying anything up it, although undoubtedly hundreds of years of the Corniglia\u2019s contents arrived exactly that way, on head, back and beast.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The town is separated by a swale from an equally steep slope with remnants of dry stone walls and the terraces they created barely visible.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Daniele, my new friend, had given me the single room with the best view\u2014a bit of the square, the headland across the swale, the sea.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although the town\u2014and all of Cinque Terre\u2014is crawling with tourists, it gets quiet early. \u00a0Maybe that\u2019s the effect of wine meeting age. \u00a0When the church bell rang once at one o\u2019clock in the morning I stuck my head out the window and looked at the square.<\/p>\n

It was empty. I listened for another sound and heard nothing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s no getting around it. \u00a0Sometimes one person’s misfortune can produce another person’s vacation. \u00a0(I won’t say good fortune.) \u00a0That’s what happened to me. Bob M, my cousin-by-marriage–it’s a relationship of love, not blood–suffered a partial retinal detachment about five weeks ago. \u00a0This frightening event forced him and his wife to cancel their plan to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-italy","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=647"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3013,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions\/3013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aweewalk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}