The Cinque Terre are five villages of pastel houses stacked on cliffs above the Ligurian Sea in Italy — Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore. Each was built in a cleft where a stream reaches the water, out of sight of pirates. They face the sea, and the sea is the only place you can see them whole. From a ferry offshore you finally see how tightly the houses are packed onto sheer rock straight above the waves, an angle no path or station on land will give you. Four of the five sit right on the water. Corniglia is the exception, perched on a headland a hundred metres up. A brick staircase zigzags from its station through thirty-three short flights, roughly 380 steps if you count them, and it stays the quietest of the five. Vernazza has the only true harbour, a curve of water where the evening goes on the quay over a plate of anchovies.
The blue-blazed coast path, the Sentiero Azzurro, links the villages along the cliffs, cut into terraces of vine and olive with open sea on one side and stacked hillside on the other. Late in the afternoon the low sun warms the facades of Manarola as the fishing boats slide back into its pocket harbour, and an hour later Riomaggiore does the same thing in blue light. Those terraces behind the houses are the real monument here. Their best grapes never go into ordinary wine: they are dried for weeks until they shrivel and then pressed into Sciacchetrà, a sweet golden wine that yields so little per vine that only a handful of growers still bother. As the farming got harder and the young left, thousands of the old dry-stone walls went untended and slumped, and unworked ground holds water badly. When the cloudburst of 2011 came, the loosened slopes gave way and slid into Vernazza and Monterosso. Keeping those walls standing is treated now as flood defence rather than heritage.