A GREAT Day in the Cinque Terre

We spent Wednesday visiting the Cinque Terre, and everyone agreed it was a spectacular day. The Cinque Terre are five villages along the shoreline here in the Liguria region of Italy; they are an Italian national park and also a UNESCO World Heritage site. And they provide just one postcard view after another.

We started in Portovenere, which is just south of the Cinque Terre. That town isn't too shabby either, as you can see:



We got a walking tour of the town, visited a cool church, took a few thousand photos, and spent a few Euros on postcards, gifts, and cappuccino. I haven't mentioned the coffee over here yet, have I? If you order a coffee, what you get is a cappuccino -- which, I'm told, is wicked strong. (I wouldn't know, as I get my caffeine from Diet Coke, or Coke Light as it's called over here.) If what you want is an American-style coffee, you have to ask for "American coffee." But usually all that means is that they take a cappuccino and add hot water to it. Whenever I've seen the Penn State travelers drinking coffee, it always seems to be the Italian version. A hardy bunch, these Penn Staters.

Anyway, I could show you lots of photos from Portovenere (and in fact you can see a bunch of photos from the trip here -- I'm updating it daily), but for now let's move on to the rest of the day: the Cinque Terre! From Portovenere we drove to La Spezia, got on a train, and got off at the Cinque Terre town of Vernazza. We had lunch there -- yet another wonderful lunch, this one featuring ravioli with some sort of creamy walnut sauce, penne pasta with a tomato-seafood sauce, some sort of white fish (I'm sure they told us what kind, but I didn't retain it), and a dessert that was somewhere between ice cream and gelato, not that I really could tell you the difference between ice cream and gelato anyway. It's all good to me.

Also at that restaurant I got to have a glass of the famous local dessert wine, called sciacchetrà. It's a very sweet white wine found only in the Cinque Terre. It takes way more grapes to make than most wines, and it has to age something like four years, so it's very expensive: a bottle can cost as much as 80 or 100 Euros. But I adore sweet white dessert wines (the sweeter, the better) so I had to try a glass. It was delicious. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it cost just 6 Euros, or about $9 U.S., including gratuity.

After lunch we had about 45 minutes to poke around the harbor in Vernazza, which is another drop-dead gorgeous spot.



Then we got back on the train, this time headed for Riomaggiore, another of the Cinque Terre villages. About a third of the group took the train the whole way to Riomaggiore and wandered around the town a bit, while the rest of us got off a stop early, at Manarola, and walked the rest of the way. The walk between Manarola and Riomaggiore is called the Via Dell'Amore, or the walk of love; it's a very scenic stroll along the cliffs next to the sea. About halfway to Riomaggiore we stopped for a group photo.



After we got to Riomaggiore and explored that village (it's important to sample the focaccia in each place we visit, I feel), we hopped back on the train and headed home to Sestri Levante.

Before dinner, our group had a chance to meet with two local residents -- a common feature on AHI trips. Their names were Francoise and Renata, and they both live in the Sestri Levante area. They talked about life in this part of Italy, about the local economy, and about the regional Genovese dialect that is dying out. The group had lots of questions for them: What is your tax structure like? What do you think of the new pope? What does Italy think of the Euro? What do Italians think of Americans? Francoise answered the latter by saying that many Italians have relatives in the States and generally enjoy the American people; she also got a big burst of applause when she said, in her charming accented English, "But we think your young people have too easily pistols."

Today we're off to Carrara to learn about marble. Those who have been there before say it should be another great experience.

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Genoa

Our excursion for Tuesday took us to Genoa, which has had several "golden ages" in its long history. It was a shipping town, a banking town, and of course the home of Christopher Columbus. Today it has more than 600,000 residents -- and more than 100,000 motor scooters! We saw large parking lots filled with nothing but scooters. Our bus driver told us that he, like many local residents, doesn't own a car -- just a scooter.

One of the highlights of Genoa was a walk down the Via Garibaldi, a street of palazzi, or mansions, dating to the 1500s. Genoa is a very cramped city, being squeezed in between the mountains and the sea, so these are not mansions that sit on huge expanses of land. Instead the streets are narrow and you have to poke your head inside one of the entryways to see how ostentatious the buildings are. Here's a little section of one of the frescoes from the ceiling inside one of the homes on Via Garibaldi.



Another good photo op was the Church of San Lorenzo, which features a variety of architectural styles -- Romanesque, French Gothic, even Moorish. The main entrance features bas-relief sculptures and two big lion sculptures. Here's a shot of one of the portals.



We also went to the Diocesan Museum, where Cristina, one of our guides for the day, gave us a short slide show/lecture on Genoa. After lunch at a local restaurant, we made a short stop at the Palazzo Ducale, which was built in the Middle Ages. I didn't catch much of the detail about this one -- actually, I always find that it's hard to take pictures and pay attention to the guide at the same time. Given a choice, I tend to take pictures! I figure I'll catch about 20 percent of what's being said and get the rest from the other passengers or the guidebooks afterward. You might refer to this as the "Shoot first, ask questions later" approach to touring.

Anyway, we didn't spend long at the Palazzo Ducale, just long enough to wander by a big art installation having something to do with the famed Chinese terra-cotta army. When we were there, workers were unpacking dozens of huge crates, each crate containing a terra-cotta soldier. It made for an irresistible photo op.



After we headed back to our hotel in Sestri Levante, we had a reception sponsored by the Penn State Alumni Association -- a tradition on Alumni Association tours. A highlight was when two of the men in the group, who had never met each other before the trip, showed up in matching Penn State shirts:



Also at the reception, the 23 Penn State travelers were joined by five Penn State students who happen to be in Italy this semester on a Study Abroad program. The students took the train over from Florence, where they're based, and hung out with us for the evening. The travelers seemed to love meeting them -- in fact, within an hour, two Penn State couples told me that when they visit Florence on Saturday (our free day), some of the students have volunteered to show them around the city.

Originally the students were planning to just stay for the reception and then head back on the 8:45 p.m. train, but everyone was having such a great time that we invited them to stay for dinner, compliments of the Alumni Association (note to the folks back in the travel office: I made an executive decision on that -- hope you don't mind! :-)) and the students decided to go back on the midnight train. Umberto, our trip director, gave them directions to a local bar they could hang out in before heading to the train station. They weren't scheduled to get back to Florence until 5:00 a.m., but they didn't seem to mind at all -- just another of their adventures in Italy this semester.

The students seemed to enjoy the travelers just as much as the travelers enjoyed the students. One of the students told me afterward that it was the highlight of their semester to be able to talk to other Penn Staters -- "a taste of home," as they put it.

First Full Day on the Riviera

Monday was our first full day on the Italian Riviera, in the region known as Liguria -- or, as our Alumni Holidays trip director, Umberto, calls it, "lee-GOO-ree-ah." Umberto is a native of Carrara (a famed marble-quarrying town we'll visit in a few days) and speaks terrific English with a very charismatic Italian accent. On Monday, for example, he was giving us instructions on how to shoo away "gypsies and beek-bockets." But I digress....

We started the day with a short briefing from Umberto, who talked about why we're staying in the town of Sestri Levante and not, for example, in the more famous town of Portofino a few miles up the coast. That's because AHI wanted to plan a trip for "travelers" and not "tourists." Here in Sestri, he said, we'll be able to see everyday life. "Portofino is a postcard," Umberto said. "This is a real town." Portofino is certainly on the itinerary -- in fact, we would see it later in the day -- but the AHI folks want us to really experience the region.

After the briefing, Antonella, who would be our guide for the day, gave us a little slide presentation. From Antonella we learned a little about the history of the region (as recently as the mid-1800s, Italy wasn't a country but rather a collection of quarrelling republics -- the Republic of Genoa, the Republic of Pisa, and so on) as well as about its industries and its food. She got my mouth watering with her descriptions of the many kinds of focaccia made here: cheese focaccia,onion focaccia, sage focaccia, and so on. It's a ubiquitous snack, she said. "When do we have focaccia? Well, normally between 5:00 in the morning and midnight."

Antonella took us on a stroll through Sestri Levante, where she showed us the many building exteriors that were cleverly painted to look as though they had window shutters, stonework, and so on. It's a technique called trompe l'oeil, a French phrase meaning, roughly, "to trick the eye." Here's an example:


Speaking of new vocabulary words, we also saw our first edicola -- a little altar or shrine on the wall of a building. Apparently we will see many more of these before the trip is over. There are 400 of these "hanging altars" in Genoa alone.


After lunch we took a short bus ride to the town of Santa Margherita de Ligure, then hopped on a boat to Portofino. It is indeed a gorgeous harbor, with colorful buildings tight up against the hillside. But Antonella was right that it's pretty much a postcard: You can see it all in about an hour. We hiked up the hill to the Church of San Giorgio, wandered around at harbor level, ate gelato, took skillions of pictures, petted a few stray cats, and got back on the boat.

Speaking of gelato, all of us are looking forward to sampling it many times in many different locations. I had a cannella (cinnamon) flavored gelato in Portofino. Camille Smith, a Penn Stater from Florida, has already found her favorite: a mix of lemon, coconut, and cherry with some chocolate sprinkled on top and a cookie plunged into it. It cost a very reasonable 1.5 Euros and made her very happy.

Tuesday we're off to Genoa. More later.

Every Bit as Picturesque as Advertised

No time for a blog entry right now -- they're keeping us busy with all this sightseeing! -- but here's a photo of Sestri Levante from our hotel.



That's the Bay of Silence on the left and the Bay of Fables on the right.

On Italian Soil

Buon giorno (or at least I think that's how you spell it) from the town of Sestri Levante, along the northwest coast of Italy. Right now it's not quite 7 a.m. local time and I can see a gorgeous orange-and-pink sunrise over the mountains out the window of our hotel lobby, where this computer terminal is located. Possibly before the day is over I will be able to tell you the name of those mountains, but right now all I know is that they are gorgeous.

We landed in Florence late yesterday afternoon, and the view of Tuscany from the plane was lovely -- rolling green hills, plus what I assume were vineyards and olive groves, and many villas and villages perched on the hilltops. (Marie Secor, one of the Penn State travelers, observed that around here they seem to put their communities on top of the hills, whereas in Pennsylvania we put them in the valleys below. Not sure why that is.)

Once we got our luggage -- and, to our delight, everybody's bags made it -- we boarded a motorcoach for the 2-1/2 hour ride northward and westward to Sestri Levante, our home base for the next week. It was already dark, as Europe ended Daylight Saving Time on Sunday, but our trip director, Umberto, still pointed out a few things along the ride: a castle from the 1100s, a lot of marble-working businesses (they looked like tombstone factories), the city of Lucca, and the town of Viareggio. The latter town is on the coast, and once we reached it, we turned north and drove up the coast to Sestri Levante -- or just "Sestri," as the locals seem to call it.

Dinner was at our hotel, which specializes, perhaps not surprisingly, in fresh seafood. Just to give you an idea: The appetizer was some sort of sea salad with fresh calamari and octopus. I must say that the thought of eating octopus scared me, but I ate it, and it was quite good. (It helped that it was just little bits of meat, not at all recognizable as octopus!) Can't wait to see what other weird foods await me.

We all headed to our rooms, happy at the prospect of sleeping in a bed for the first time in at least 36 hours, and happier still at the thought of seeing what this place will look like in the daylight.

We're Almost There!

Greetings from the Munich airport, where we have arrived safely after an overnight flight from Dulles and are now waiting for our flight to Florence. Our excitement at having the trip be underway is dampened a bit by having heard the outcome of last night's Penn State-Ohio State game. Right now one of the Penn State passengers is reading Neil Rudel's account of the game on my BlackBerry while I post this blog entry on my laptop.

Our flight left Dulles last night around 9:15, so we were able to follow the action of the first quarter while sitting at the gate and for a little while after we boarded the plane. A friend of mine was at the game, in the club seats section, and sending me updates from her BlackBerry to my BlackBerry, so I could pass them on to the other Penn Staters. A sampling of her e-mails to me:

--"The team just arrived at the stadium. Could not tell if #14 was the good Anthony or the bad Anthony."

--"OMG...there are 2 Buckeyes in the row in front of us. This is sacred ground for heaven's sake!"

--"Getting messages out of the stadium is impossible! Of course every student is text messaging..."

--"Good sign - the drum major landed both flips! They did a 2005 video of the OSU game that brought down the house."

Bob Secor, one of the Penn State travelers, brought a portable satellite radio on the trip and was listening to the Steve Jones-Jack Ham broadcast on his headphones. So we'd get periodic updates from him as well: "Ohio State kicked off" ... "Ohio State has a third-and-five" ... "Ohio State, 3-0."

I think Penn State had just fallen behind 17-7 when the flight attendant announced that it was time for us to "turn off and stow all electronic devices." So we spent the entire overnight flight not knowing the outcome of the game. The minute we landed in Munich, I turned on my BlackBerry and found this e-mail from my friend at the stadium:

"Well, there's no way to put lipstick on this pig. It was OSU 37 PSU 17. We were badly outplayed. Wallace did have a KO return for our last TD.... It was not a good showing for PSU on national TV. You made a wise decision to go to Italy instead of to the game."

We're all disappointed, but we figure soon we'll be on the Italian Riviera, eating pesto, drinking Italian wine, and saying, "Football? What's that?"

Our Bags Are Packed—Or Soon Will Be

On Saturday night, right around the time the Penn State-Ohio State game kicks off in Beaver Stadium, nearly two dozen Penn Staters will board a plane at Dulles and set off on a redeye flight headed to Europe. It's the first leg of a week-long Penn State Alumni Association trip to the Italian Riviera—also known as Liguria—a colorful, historic region along the northwest coast of Italy.

Most of us will fly from Dulles to Munich, then from Munich to Florence. From there we'll board a motor coach and be driven to the coastal town of Sestri Levante, where we'll be based for the week. From Sestri Levante we'll head off on excursions every day. Here's a sampling of what's on our itinerary:

—Genoa, believed to be the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, and also home to a lovely cathedral (not to mention a cool aquarium);

—Portofino, a famous and romantic seaside town, and the neighboring town of Santa Margherita;

—The Cinque Terre, five picturesque hillside villages that are UNESCO World Heritage sites;

—Carrara, famous for its marble quarries; and

—Villa Torrigiana, a fabled country mansion and gardens.

Many mornings also feature an informal talk by a local guide about the region's history and culture.

I hope to post something nearly every day, Internet access permitting. Check back regularly and see what we're up to. In the meantime here's a stock photo from Manarola, one of the five villages of the Cinque Terre. We're all hoping to be taking photos of sights like this in just a few short days.