Old Gnarled Rockcutters

We took a train over to the Cinque Terra area on the west coast of Italy. Luckily for us, we got caught in a train workers strike. There’s always a strike somewhere in Italy. So we got trapped in this little town away from where we wanted to be. We spent a night in a bed and breakfast and then two days camping and it was great. It was a real little Italian town. Before this we had mostly just been to big cities and I was relieved to find the same Italian and European culture alive on a smaller scale.

The funny thing about Italy is that everyone is a small business. Ninety percent of Italian businesses are under 100 employees. In this little town there were scores of small Pizzerias, Gelaterias, photo studios, and barbers. This is a little deceptive. Every little business actually has a network of tight relations with several others. Once you enter into one node of the network they make it very very easy to stay and do business with only their friends. Larger businesses exist, but often disguise themselves as distributed small “families” for tax and PR reasons. This sort of business culture and the endemic Italian disregard for the law, lends itself quite naturally to secretive organizations that don’t play by the rules. Sicily, of course, has been the most successful at exporting this Italian specialty to the United States.

The food in Italy follows very traditional lines. They figured out what “the best” dishes were ages ago and have not messed with it. You’re not gonna find Hawaiian pizza here. We had dinner in the town of La Spezia one night and this really cute waiter politely signed to us that he was totally changing our food and our vino because what we had chosen was unsuitable. The meal he came up with was excellent, but to test a theory, we had a chianti the next night with fish. While we were allowed to have it, many people in the trattoria did indeed stare quizzically at our table throughout the whole meal.

The Cinque Terra area itself is gorgeous. The area feels a bit like the American southwest with the light brown soil, yucca and red terra cotta roofs. All the Italian cooking herbs grow to giant size around here like weeds. The tiny towns themselves are filled with tourists. Hobbling among them you can see the tough, gnarled old men who carved these coastal villages out of solid rock with their hands, breaking their bodies so their children could one day… sell kitsch to Germans.

You can take the train to all the towns in this region, but we felt spry and hiked over the mountains. As we climbed up over the rocky ground weaving through the olive groves the air was filled with the scent of rosemary, thyme, lemon, lavender, the crumbly earth and spray from the sea. Later we descended from the exhilarating views to go swimming in the Mediterranean. Its such a lovely climate.

Some more pictures.

Next we conquer Florence!