After spending a beautiful albeit cloudy day in Florence, the sun decided to finally pop its head out! With this in mind, I decided it make perfect sense to head over to one of the most colourful places in Italy; Cinque Terre.
We parked the car off and hopped on the train to what was fast becoming one of my favourite of the 5 towns; Manarola.
As it turns out, we weren’t the only ones who decided to make the most of the sunshine as people sprawled out on the rocks, taking time for the occasional dip into the Ligurian Sea.
Manarola is an absolute beauty of place – especially so with the sun shining on it and the contrasting blue skies in the background.
*The only thing better than this view is seeing it gelato-in-hand! 😉
After mooching around Manarola, we decided to head over to perhaps the quietest of Cinque Terre’s 5 Towns – Corniglia!
Corniglia is arguably the only one of the lot which doesn’t have its own vantage viewpoint. i.e. that perfect place to get beautiful photos of the entire place.
Vernazza has the spot on the nearby mountain, Manarola has the balcony down by the seafront. Riomaggiore has the rocks on the seafront. Even Monterosso has a promenade however Corniglia has a charm that’s absolutely unmissable when you stroll through its cute little streets.
Also, don’t be fooled, Corniglia still gets as busy so the others so don’t expect to come here to ‘escape the crowds’. Everyone knows how beautiful Corniglia is and wants in on the action.
By this point, the faint rumbling in my tummy from hunger pangs had turned into a full-on growl; complete with occasional roaring and so we decided to stop for lunch in Corniglia.
Lunch over, and my mind still firmly on food, I went off in search of ice cream albeit via a long-winded route as my excuse to see even more of Corniglia.
Eventually, it was time to say ciao to Corniglia and all of Cinque Terre as we headed hopped back onto the train, picked up the car and made our way slowly back to Tuscany!
Back in the farmhouse, I managed to lose all track of time and before you knew it, it was almost 10 pm.
I had in mind a restaurant that we’d visited on the first day (it was so good and such a brilliant find) however, we arrived to find that it was closed on this night!
Luckily, this proved the perfect reason to go explore the nearby town of Montaione.
Eventually, we found what appeared to be one of the only restaurants opened and dived into a mountain of pasta, pizzas and calzones! *licks lips*
The next morning, it was time to finally head back to London. And with that, we packed up said farewell to our amazing Tuscan farmhouse, this fun yet laidback week in Italy and made ours to Bergamo.
Which, by the way, is very under-rated and is an amazing place to visit in and of itself!
Oh, Italy – you have been fun.
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