CHIAVARI, Italy – You won’t
find the Riviera towns listed below featured in Travel and Leisure or Code Nast
Traveler, or even talked about in the travel section of your local newspaper.
These are the towns in Liguria that the Italians keep for themselves. And more
often than not, they are the towns their grandparents came from. You see these
towns strung along the rocky coast of the Mediterranean Sea, tiny borgos with tall,
pastel colored houses and narrow winding streets. Everybody knows everybody
else, and they know their families too.
They all grew up together.
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| Levanto |
LEVANTO – Levanto isn’t one
of the towns of the Cinque Terre that poets and literary types love so well,
but it is part of the Cinque Terre National Park, which is probably a better
thing. The town is on the Ligurian coast at the end of a valley that is thickly
wooded with olive and pine trees. There have been a lot of changes in Levanto
over the years, including its name. The town started life as small village
called Ceula and after the fall of the Roman Empire (476 AD), it became part of
the Byzantine Empire. I won’t bore you with all the details, sufficient to say
that by 1229 control of the town had passed to the Republic of Genoa. This was
good because there were natural resources in and around Levanto that brought in
a lot of money for the Republic, like Levanto’s red marble which is still sold
today. Other things they still sell are olive oil and local wine, both of which
are very good. About 5,000 people live here now and they don’t mind if you come
to visit, but they are not going to break out the good dishes and the fancy
silverware, you’ll have to take them as they are.
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| Moneglia |
MONEGLIA – Moneglia is
special. A few years ago it was added to the list of “borghi piu belli d’Italia”,
the most beautiful villages in Italy. About 2,800 people live in Moneglia year ‘round,
it’s the summer of course, it’s another story. The town sits on a large bay
between Cape Moneglia to the west and Cape Rospo to the east. Cape Moneglia is
completely wild and you can only get there on foot, but Cape Rospo is easier to
explore. The town is almost too old to even date, going back to the days
wandering tribes crossed the Alps in search of habitable land. Even though they
were pushed back by the Etruscans, some did survive only to be pounded again by
the Romans. And so it went for centuries until the Romans found other people to
pound on and went north. The town is basically two streets wide. The main
street, Corso Libero Longhi, is lined with palm trees and has a tropical air
about it. There are a couple of hotels and a restaurant or two, a bar and a
newsstand and that’s about it. That seems to be more than enough for the people
who live there, and those who visit when the weather is nice, like me.
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| Deiva Marina |
DEIVIA MARINA - Deiva Marina
is a small town that started out in the hills of Liguria, probably sometime
around the year 775. Records show that the first settlers were from Lombardy,
which is interesting since most of the tourist who go there today are from
Lombardy, specifically Milan. Some things never change. That hillside
settlement was called Deiva and as the years past, centuries actually, the
villagers moved closer and closer to the sea, building another village which
they called Marina and eventually the two villages became one. At the time,
Deiva was a fiefdom of the local Marquis, Marquis da Passano, who built a
castle there as you could do things like that in the year 1144. The village thrived
and by the 1500’s Deiva had a population of 100 men, women and children. But life in Liguria has never been simple and
as the years passed so did control of the town. In the 1600’s it was under the
Republic of Genoa, 100 years later it was Napoleon Bonaparte who ruled and the
village became part of the First French Empire. Fast forward another hundred
years and now it was part of the Kingdom of Sardinia quickly followed by the
Kingdom of Italy. And through all this to and fro-ing and changing of
governments, not much has changed in the town except the population has
grown from 100 people to 1,461 people. And that is probably a very good thing.
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| Fezzano |
FEZZANO
- Fezzano, a tiny suburb of the town of La Spezia, is known for two things. The
first is it is one of the thirteen townships that participates in the Palio del
Golfo held every year on the first Sunday in August. That’s a big deal. There
are only 950 people in Fezzano and at least six of them have to know how to
row. It’s not really a problem though as the Fezzani are natural born sailors. In the 1700’s Fezzano had what was considered
a huge fleet of sailboats, forty to be exact, and the bravura of its sailors
was known far and wide. The second thing about Fezzano is that the most
beautiful woman of the Renaissance, the one they called the living Venus, was
born here. Her name was Simonetta Cattaneo de Candia Vespucci. When she was 16
years old she married Marco Vespucci, a cousin of the famous Amerigo Vespucci
who gave his name to – well, America. The couple settled in Florence and there
Simonetta met the painter Sandro Botticelli and she soon became his muse. It is
Simonetta you see in Botticelli’s most famous work, The Birth of Venus. Needless
to say that after the world saw her naked, she became very popular, but it was
Guiliano de Medici, the youngest son of the powerful, and extremely rich,
Lorenzo de Medici, who convinced her to become his mistress. Too bad they don’t
make sugar daddies like that anymore.
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| Bonassola |
BONASSOLA – The town of
Bonassola is so small that the brochures published by the local tourist bureau
only lists two things to do there. You’ll find the town just a few miles north
of its more famous neighbors the Cinque Terre, wedged between the mountains and
the sea, which doesn’t give its 940 inhabitants much room to expand. It’s a
very old town, in fact some historians think it was settled by the Greeks some
800 years before Christ was born. Once upon a time it was an important trade
and shipping center, but today its main draw is its beauty. When writer Ernest
Hemingway visited Bonassola, he called the town “sweet and memorable”, and it
still is. As other resort towns on the Italian Riviera attract more and more
tourists and in return have become more touristy then typical, Bonassola is
pretty much the same as it was 30 or 40 years ago.
