Long way home pt. 5: Italy

Little did I realize at the time, when I was watching my family take off out of Krakow, that a couple days later I would be in yet another place where I would feel like part of a family. This next family knows little more than a few words in English and therefore it isn't spoken in the house, regardless they still somehow transmit the warm togetherness that you feel when you're with your family. I wasn't with mine anymore but I still felt it in a household whose walls knew both Italian and Romanian. Maybe it was Gianni, the newest addition to the family, Mihai's first nephew, that brought out the warm family feel in the house. Such was my experience of Italy in September. For the most part it was a feeling of being home, a strange and new place that didn't feel so strange and new. There was love in the house, great home cooking, and excitement for things to come. We were visiting the home of Mihaela's sister Linda, Angelo and Gianni, and though it was somewhat a time of reunion and enjoying each others company we still took a few days to get our tourism on.

Parma is a city in northern Italy situated directly in between the two better known cities of Milan and Bologna. I hadn't even heard of Parma until Mihai told me her sister lived there and she made the Parma-parmesan cheese connection for me. The whole family, including Mihai who arrived just a couple of hours earlier, packed into the car and drove two hours out to Bergamo airport just to pick me up. The greatest part of my Parmigiano experience was the food. We didn't go out to eat at expensive Italian restaurants, we didn't walk around testing out the local “street meat,” we ate inside, in the home of an Italian-Romanian family eating both Italian and Romanian food. Linda is one of the best cooks I know and my favorite dish must have been her eggplant parmesan which I haven't yet had the courage to try making myself. Aside from the good home-cooking we did take a couple of days to stroll through the rather small city in northern Italy. Parma is not a tourist town but I quickly realized in our stroll through center that even the cities in Italy that tourists don't flock to have a lot of historical beauty and significance. A not so touristy city in Italy would might actually be quite a touristy city in other European countries.

One of our days was spent in the nearby city of Bologna. It was there that I became infatuated with the covered walkways lining a good number of the streets in its historical center area. It was a day of slow strolling over old stones. After a good coffee on a side-street corner we headed for the hill hoping to get a nice look out over the city. The road that we took up the hill ended up being the wrong road. It took us through a wealthy residential area with newer three-story houses with elevators in them. The walk did little more than tire us out as we never reached heights were we could catch nice views. We descended back down into the city for some more walking around before settling in a sketchy park for a bit. From there we decided to call it a day and catch the next train back to Parma.

We finally made it to Cinque Terre after about a week in Italy. The plan was to go there earlier but I was pretty sick for my first few days in Italy. The day after our original planned visit an Australian tourist was injured as she was swept off the path by a mudslide. Trail number 2, stretching from the northern most town of Monterosso all the way through the region along the sea-side ending in Riomaggiore was closed down. No longer could we go there from Parma and through-hike it in a day. The news dampened our spirits for sure, but our minds were still set on visiting the region that we had already heard so much about so we decided to go regardless.

An early-morning train took us directly from Parma to the northern-most town of Cinque Terre, Monterosso. Exiting the train station, the sea was right in front of us. Once again we had come back to the seaside. We had already been to the sea several times throughout the year in different places and it was nice to be by the water yet again, even if it was too cold to jump into. It was nice to just sit there on beach, watch the water, and feel the sun beating down on your forehead. We followed a path along the water taking us around a hill and into the main part of the town. An elevated train track passes over old cobblestone streets of a small European church-centered town. This charming little town is one of five beautiful places that make up Cinque Terre, each place with its own unique feel and beauty. We no longer had the option of taking trail #2 to the next town so we decided instead to get a train pass that would last us the day and that could connect use to each of the five towns.

The next was Vernazza. The train station dropped us on the main boulevard which led directly down to the water after a five minute walk. It was down the by water that we climbed up some steep walkways to the small fortress where we could look down on the town and the sea from its high walls.

Corniglia, the third of the five towns, is the only one that isn't actually located on the water. The town is situated on a steep hill high above the water and after exiting the train station a 15 minute hike up a road is in order. Its position high above the water offers a nice viewpoint from atop its walls facing the sea. It was in Corniglia that we stopped to eat some delicious pizza for lunch and prepare for our hike of the day.

Despite trail #2 being inaccessible, there were some other trails in the park and I wanted to hike at least one of them during our day in Cinque Terre. I decided on the trail from Corniglia to Manarola because it was the shortest possible town-town hike at the time and I knew that, though short, it would still be a difficult one. Cinque Terre is a place where very steep hills sharply descend to the sea. The first 20 minutes of our hike took us straight up the steep hill behind Corniglia. From high above the sea the trail traversed the hillside through expanses of terraced grape fields. From the hillside we could see down to the sea. We could see both the town we had just left from and the town we were headed toward, as well as another small town situated much further up the hill. The hike eventually took us a couple of hours to complete but at the end of it we had reached what is probably the most beautiful of the five towns, Manarola. It was there that I went down by the water, sat on a bench, and watched as night grew nearer.

There was one more town to reach before our last train back to Parma. We boarded the local train that was to take us to Riomaggiore. After being on the train for what seamed like less that a minute, the train stopped. We couldn't see anything outside as our end of the train was still in the tunnel. A fellow American tourist was there trying to get the door open but he couldn't before the train was moving again. We had missed Riomaggiore and were on to the next city just minutes away, La Spezzia. The goal was to get to each of the 5 towns in a day and luckily for us, we still had the option to hit Riomaggiore. We jumped back on a local train going the other way without tickets and we managed to reach the southern-most town of Cinque Terre with about a half hour to roam the the sparsely lit streets. It was gorgeous even at night. It's too bad that we couldn't spend more time there. Our next train out of the small, town would take us all the way back to Parma after a long day of discovery at Cinque Terre.

Italy is a beautiful country with what seems to be a high living standard. I was in the northern part of the country. The streets were spotless, happy families strolled through parks and over walking paths in Parma while tourists snapped shot after shot of Cinque Terre. Though beautiful, for me there was something missing in Italy. I think it was the cleanliness and the high standard of living that made it seem barely lived-in at all. Maybe, coming from central and eastern Europe Italy was just on the other side of the spectrum for me. At our next stop I would find some dirtier streets, some interesting people, fun language, and sun in a country that feels very lived-in, Spain. My northern Italy experience was more about family, Mihai, Linda, Angelo and Gianni, and that is what made it the memorable experience that it was.