My to-date photographic portfolio of Cinque Terre on these pages is the extreme example of “outsourcing” photo hosting to external services. I included a single picture of each village in the summary WH post, and revisited that only a couple of times within the intermittent “Postcards from” series (one picture of Vernazza, one of Manarola).
To be fair, I did not have a large quantity of photographs to share. We’ve only been to Cinque Terre once for a grand total of 3 days, and spent a good portion of that time walking the coastal trail of Sentiero Azzurro rather than exploring the villages (I know – shocking! – if you are familiar with my reluctant attitudes towards hiking in nature). My approach to travel photography back then did not yet evolve significantly beyond taking wide “emblematic” shots of a given locale. There is definitely not enough material to support individual village retrospectives.
Except for Vernazza. It was our base for the stay on Cinque Terre. Spending three full mornings and three full evenings in Vernazza allowed us to explore it to a greater degree than other villages. You will still see primarily wide-angle postcard-type perspectives below, but at least there are more of them than from the other four of the five villages.
We’ll start with the picture of the harbor, presided over by the church of St. Margaret of Antioch.
Vernazza is the only Cinque Terre village with a proper harbor, which greatly contributes to my assertion that it is the most picturesque of all.
Walking a few steps to the right and keeping roughly the same angle brings closer the tiny beach by the harbor and the village focal point, Piazza Guglielmo Marconi.
We are currently standing with our backs directly to the apartment that we had rented for our Vernazza stay. I loved getting up early, planting myself in a chair by the door on this spot, and spending a fair chunk of each morning observing the village coming to life after a night of sleep.
The next frame, taken from a deck of a ferry, focuses on the upper reaches of Vernazza, dominated by the Convent of San Francisco.
As we are climbing towards the segment of Sentiero Azzurro that leads to Corniglia, we are now in the middle of that jumble of houses. The convent to the right is yet higher on the mountain slope, while the tower of Santa Margarita is at eye level in the middle of the picture.
The next view appeared on this blog in the aforementioned “Postcard from Vernazza” post. From higher up on the way to Corniglia, we see almost the entire village and its harbor below.
You can also see in the bottom left corner the edge of the rocky wild beach on the south side of the village. Google Maps marks it as “Vernazza Beach”, and it is a reasonable option for a quick dip in the sea. But the only “good” beaches in Cinque Terre are in Monterosso al Mare, the westernmost of all villages.
You can just discern Monterosso in the distance in the upper portion of the frame.
Reversing the direction, when walking the segment of Sentiero Azzurro that connects Monterosso to Vernazza, the first glimpse of the village provides the best illustration of how geographically isolated the settlements of Cinque Terre are.
And then, within the reach of the village, the most iconic of all views of Vernazza opens up in all its glory. I barely have a favorite in this sequence of slightly distinct perspectives, so I’ll include them all in this selection.
For reasons that escape me now, we never walked all the way up to the Castello Doria Vernazza, the thousand-year-old highest point in the village. We did, however, venture into the labyrinth of stairways and passageways away from the harbor.
If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, you know that I very infrequently take and display portraits of my family members. Going through Vernazza archives reminded me of one of the best portraits I ever took of my lovely better half.
In that shot, she is standing right outside of our apartment. If we were to step inside, we would still get a full frontal view of Santa Margarita of Antioch through the window.
And here is the reverse perspective from the church terrace – you can just see Natasha in the window next to the gelateria awning.
Let’s use another angle of that most iconic of Vernazza views, so that you can find that awning – and our window – in the center of the harborside promenade.
That we haven’t been back is pretty hard to believe. One day, certainly!