The Cinque Terre
Five villages without a proper road, held up by dry stone walls and by a train.
Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore stand in a row along twelve kilometres of sheer coast, each inside a fold of the rock. Until a hundred years ago they were reached by boat or on foot; today the normal way is the train, which comes in and out of the tunnel and stops at all five.
They are a Unesco site not for the villages but for the terraces: seven thousand kilometres of dry stone wall built by hand, which made a vertical mountain farmable. Where nobody maintains them, the mountain starts coming down again.
How to visit them
By train and with the park card, not by car: the access roads are narrow, the car parks tiny and nearly always full. The Sentiero Azzurro links the five villages high above the sea, but some sections stay closed by landslides for years: check before you set off.
The right moment is early morning or evening. Between ten and five, from May to October, the villages fill beyond measure, and Vernazza and Riomaggiore, the smallest, become hard even to walk through.
The campsites are not in the villages but above them, towards Levanto and Deiva Marina, and from there the train drops down in minutes: it is the most comfortable way to see them without sleeping there.