Italy's long-isolated Levanto is rising

There are some friends you can trust, and others you can't. Especially when it comes to questions of travel. Here I was in a farm in Tuscany in mid-June, complete with honeybees and olive trees meals al fresco and walks in the woods. It was all too beautiful. So how could I not trust my friend's suggestion to rent a room from a friend of his in the mythical Cinque Terre, where I was heading next? Four trains and a very rubbery panino later, I arrived in Vernazza - the jewel in Cinque Terre's tiara. My room turned out to be a windowless cement box nestled at the end of a narrow alley costing €60 (Dh314) a night. This was the least of Vernazza's tarnishing. I had barely stepped out of my box when I collided into a stream of walkers uniformly dressed from head to toe like soldiers of the Patagonia army - fierce, retired, 60-somethings dressed in Patagonia shorts, jackets, visors, shirts and Yerba packs. Forget about the famed Gothic church of Santa Margherita d'Antiochia and the Genoese lookout towers. If you want to get anywhere in Vernazza you'd have to do battle first with the throngs of silver tigers armed with walking poles, ready to take on the high altitude treks overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, and anyone who happened to be in their way. It was a shame, really. I had been looking forward to discovering the Cinque Terre - the "five lands" that form part of Italy's most rugged coastline, isolated and inaccessible for centuries until a railway was completed in 1874. This austere landscape of rock and sea inspired Eugenio Montale to write a poem I'd read and loved many years ago - The Lemons. At the time, I didn't know that Montale had written it in Monterosso - part of the Cinque Terre - where he spent a lot of time. But his image of lemons as "trumpets of gold" has never left me.Literary types have always found the Cinque Terre inviting. Cesare Pavese and Salvatore Quasimodo favoured Bocca di Magra in the 1940s and '50s. DH Lawrence knocked about in Portovenere. Percy Bysshe Shelley set sail from the Bay of Lerici and capsized farther up the coast, his body washing up on the shores of Viareggio. And Lord Byron is immortalised in an annual swimming competition called the Byron's Cup in the aptly named Golfo dei Poeti. Everything I'd read about the Cinque Terre evoked poetry: hamlets clinging like dazzling pearls to hilltops, vertigo-inducing sights and delicious focaccia bread. Imagine my disappointment, then, when the most lasting impression was the whiff of the sewer being repaired in the main square of Vernazza - a miniscule piece of land locked into a claustrophobic bay. What with the smell, the silver tigers and the ridiculously overpriced restaurants, I couldn't wait to get out of there. Luckily, I received an invitation to a town nearby from another friend who was on the set of a film he'd written. Faster than I could say arrivederci, I settled my bill and hopped onto the quaint, panoramic train that links the harbour towns along the coast. Within 15 minutes of cutting through the Apennines - plunging into the darkness of its tunnels and then suddenly being thrust into the glorious life-giving light and views of blue sea and sky - I finally arrived in Levanto. Around 20km north of Vernazza, the town of 6,000 inhabitants is not one of the five lands that make up the Cinque Terre but it is part of the province of La Spezia and the Cinque Terre National Park. Few people got off at the semi-deserted train station. I looked around, still frazzled by Vernazza. No pension fund warriors here. No overpriced cafes. No stench in the air. Instead, there was a salty breeze wafting in from the coast, indicating that things might just be getting better. By the end of the day I would have discovered the joys of gattafin and cream of sage and been proposed marriage on the beach by an Italian ice-cream maker called Lino. But for the moment, I was content to walk down the steps and meander along the wide boulevards filled with strollers, families and Levantesi going about their business. The peach- and ochre-coloured houses with trompe l'oeil decorations, bicyclists droning by lazily and piazzas dotted with cafes all gave me the feeling of having landed in a better-kept Havana. From / The National