italy | Fletch Travels

Cinque Terre is made up of 5 towns. The best way to visit the towns is by boat, train or foot. The towns and the hillsides are now part of the Cinque Terre National Park which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When they say millions of tourists visit Cinque Terra visit annually, I feel like we saw all of them today. I can’t imagine how the towns must be in the summer.

We decided to start in our town of Monterosso and hike to the next village. We are at the most northern village so it made sense to start here. You pay a fee to hike which is worth the cost for the views and how well the trails were maintained. I’m pretty sure I took more pictures from the trails that I actually did in the towns. You can’t buy the trail ticket until around 9 so you really can’t get an early start before the crowds get there. They do this in case they want to close the trails because of rain. They have had several issues with landslides over the years and the trail between two the of the towns have been closed since 2019 because of landslide issues. We started our hike up a lot of stairs. We made it to the next village and walked around the town a little before heading on the hiking trail to the next village. That trail was also a lot of stairs and people. There were a couple of nice breaks where you could by an orange and sit down with a view. From the third town we had to take a train to get to the fourth village. Just to get to the train station, there was probably 100 stairs down. To say the train was packed is an understatement. The ride was only 4 minutes long but you had to stand and it took well more than 4 minutes to get off the platform. The fourth town was so crowded with people that we literally walked to the town and then immediately left and head back to Monterosso. So we skipped the fifth town but kept some of our sanity by not trying to push our way on another train. The hiking trails are the way to go here and for sure give you the best views.

In all, we did the equivalent of around 150 flights of stairs. I think staying here 2 nights is about perfect as I’m not sure I could handle all of the tourists for another day. I really had a hard time picking pictures as the area is so beautiful.

We are staying in Verona for 4 nights and using it as a base to explore areas within driving distance. Although we have been to Lake Garda in the past, we didn’t spend a lot of time on the east side of the lake. Lake Garda is Italy’s largest lake and it can take a long time to drive around it. We drove to a town called Torri del Benaco and walked around the charming town. Parking was easy for once as they had a large lot and we are here before the high tourist season. The jasmine is in full bloom and smells so fragrant. We ended up walking so long that we decided to stay and have lunch there since they had charming restaurants with tables on a dock over the lake. The water has a pretty greenish color and is very clean.

From there, we drove north to Monte Baldo cable car which is located in Malcesine. We found parking pretty close to the cable car and timed things pretty perfectly so we didn’t have to wait too long. The ride was really two rides as they make you change cars half way up. The second cable car did one complete circle on the way up so everyone had a view at some point. A good amount of people on the cable care were going up to paraglide back down. It is a hiker and mountain biker paradise at the top. Unfortunately the weather followed us and we were pretty much above the clouds. That didn’t stop people jumping but we did get stuck in a hailstorm at the top. I would for sure come back here for a day of hiking if I could.