I’m not sure what it is about waves, but both Meredith and I are are quite happy to watch waves come in to the shore. If you add in twenty mph winds and the surf is up, then it’s even better. We finally got to the coast today, leaving Lucca for the Italian Rivera. We had to change trains one time in Pisa, but our first train was fifteen minutes late, so we missed our second train. We got rebooked on the next train about thirty minutes later, so all was well.

We have the working harbor and town of La Spezia as our home base for the day. We got checked into our hotel, which seems to be run by a religious order (all the rooms are named for saints), with the profits going to the order’s charitable work and for programs for kids. It’s a very nice place, and the people are great. We were a bit surprised to come home in the evening to dozens of children running around the indoor square that serves as a couple of small soccer fields, but that was okay. We’re not sure if we have hot water yet, but that seems to be the only drawback.

We dumped our bags and walked a couple of blocks to catch a bus for the thirty-minute bus ride to the adorably cute coastal hill town of Porto Venere. Along the coast in this area are the Cinque Terre (“the five towns”), which were very remote fishing villages until the railway came to them. The towns are dramatic and very cute, and so tourists discovered them, and now even tour boats pull into the bigger harbors. Porto Venere is south of the Cinque Terre and remains a quiet town. It has tourists, of course, but the pace is still slow. That’s where we spent the afternoon – wandering the streets of the small town and the coastline along the front of the town.

Porto Venere is situated on a large hill or cliff, and so the town is very vertical. We started at the edge of the sea and explored streets and paths at that level until we went up to the next street or path, and so on. There seem to be four (or more) distinct levels to the town, each with narrow streets that can open up into jaw-dropping views of the Mediterranean coast or views of the harbor back toward La Spezia.

Out at the very tip of the land of the town is St. Peter’s Church, a small, pretty church made of striped marble. The church was open, and so we looked inside. It has a plain interior, and Mer found a wedding program on the lectern. It’s a dramatic place to get married. The church is next to an old fort or tower of some kind, and while many of the old doors were barred off, the windows were still open to let people look out over the land and sea. The sea was quite active today with windy conditions, so it was fun to see it (and not be on it).

We then wandered the main shopping street, which is all of about eight feet wide, and we found a four-table restaurant to eat in. The place specializes in focaccia bread and in pesto, both of which hail from this part of Italy. We ate well. That didn’t stop us from getting pastries that we ate while sitting on a bench down by the sea. Good times.

The best part of the day was next. We found an opening in the seaward side of the old fortress wall, with a plaque claiming that Lord Byron had been inspired by this small harbor. I can see why. The hole in the wall let us go down on the rocks next to the ocean, where the waves were crashing against the shore. Most of the waves were good-sized and put on a show, but every now and then, a really big wave would come in and crash spray thirty feet into the air. We all pulled up seats on the rock and watched the waves come in, and we watched people watching and laughing as waves came in. A few people got very wet, and Meredith got slightly caught in wave spray from a big one when she was down closer to the water. We sat watching the waves for a long time.

We then explored up more, stopping at another church. It was also open, and had a surprisingly modern wall sculpture for a small church in a small, traditional-feeling town. It was of the deposition of Jesus’ body, and had an angel and Mary and Mary lamenting over Jesus’ body. Meredith and I both liked it very much. The church also had a cedar of Lebanon log from about 1100 that had been used to house relics at some point. But at one point we had the church to ourselves, and so I encouraged Meredith to sing the Doxology to test the acoustics. They were superb, with her voice hanging in the space for two seconds or so after each note. It was beautiful.

We went along a path which culminated in the town cemetery and the town castle. The castle was closed, but the cemetery was open, so we explored that some. The small part of the grounds we covered had graves of a 100-year-old woman and a 113-year-old man. I guess sea air is good for you.

Once we verified that the castle was closed, we meandered down small alleyways of stairs to the main street again, where we picked up some focaccia for the four-hour train trip we have back to Milan tomorrow. We picked up some gelato for the four-minute walk to the benches by the sea, where we ate our ice cream in grand surroundings.

We got the bus back to La Spezia and got reorganized at the hotel before heading back out briefly to explore a small part of the town. We walked down the pedestrian shopping zone that had Christmas-style lights overhead with multiple messages in Italian that amounted to something like, “Paris and Rome and Milan are great, but La Spezia is okay by us!” It was fun and festive.

The pedestrian zone ended by the working harbor – fishing boats were moored next to pleasure craft, and we could look over to a shipping dock area of huge cranes. But the harbor also had a pretty pedestrian bridge over part of the harbor and had a palm-tree-lined paved path for people to enjoy. It’s clearly not a tourist-trap area, but it was certainly a pleasant place that I would use if I lived here.

We turned around and went back to the pedestrian shopping area to get supper at a local pizza place. From there, we took a slightly different way home to the hotel, which ended our exploration of the Italian Riviera for this trip. Tomorrow we head back to Milan in preparation to fly home on Saturday. But we’re not quite ready yet to wave goodbye to Italy. On to Milan!