Locks of Love

When I was in Italy last year I visited and posted about the Cinque Terre in Liguria.  What I did not post at that time was the practice whereby couples place locks with their names on in the belief that whilst the locks stay locked their names will also be linked in love.  

Until the last century the Cinque Terre towns were extremely isolated and the townspeople rarely married anyone from outside their own town. After the blasting of the second train line in the 1920s, a trail was made between the first two towns: Riomaggiore and Manarola. A gunpowder warehouse was built along the way, safely away from the townspeople. (That building is today’s Bar dell’Amore mentioned in my post.)

Constant landslides kept the trail closed more often than it was open. After World War II, the trail was reopened, and became established as a lovers’ meeting point for boys and girls from the two towns. (After one extended closure in 1949, the trail was reopened for a Christmas marriage.). A journalist, who noticed all the amorous graffiti along the path, coined the trail’s now-established name, Via dell’Amore: “Pathway of Love.”

This new pathway changed the social dynamics between the two villages and made life much more fun and interesting for courting couples. Today, many tourists are put off by the cluttered graffiti that lines the trail but it’s all part of the history of the Cinque Terre’s little lovers’ lane.

You’ll see a cluster of padlocks under the tunnel, on the Manarola side. Closing a padlock with your lover onto a cable or railing at a 'love place'—often a bridge—is the current craze in Italy, having been re-popularized by a teen novel.  

Now, it seems, that craze is taking hold in Scotland and I discovered locks on the bridge between the centre of Pitlochry and the town's Little Theatre. 

The Lovers - the symbol of the Via dell'Amore

Locks on the safety railings 

A lock inscribed with names on the bridge at Pitlochry

The Cinque Terre

The Cinque Terre (Five Towns) on the Ligurian coast north of Pisa is strung along 18km of serrated cliffs between Levanto and La Spezia, and is one of Italy's treasures. These five higgledy-piggledy villages – Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore – are cut off by mountains choked with olive groves and dry-stone-walled vineyards, where farmers have eked out a living over the centuries.

The Cinque Terre became a Unesco World Heritage site in 1997, which includes a protected marine area, and became a national park (Parco Nazionale delle Cinque Terre) in 1999. Wine growers still use monorail mechanisms to ferry themselves up and the grapes down these unique lands, and in some cases have to harvest by boat. If the terraced hillsides are not worked, they will quite literally slide into the sea.  (Read more: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/italy/cinque-terre#ixzz28pd9e3jw).

Mo had decided that it was a 'must see' and Diane and I were very happy to see it too.  A friend in New Zealand had planned to walk the five towns a few years ago but the group she was going with abandoned it at the last minute.  We set off at the crack of dawn to get there before the crowds.  We took the train from La Spezia and were at the most southerly town of Riomaggiore before the gates to the walk were manned (tickets permitting you to do the walk were obtainable at the rail station though).

The first photo taken from Riomaggiore shows the extent of the Cinque Terre which stretch as far as the  sunlit promontory in this photo:

The first sector of the walk from the south

We arrived at Riomaggiore very early before the crowds (and before the sun had penetrated the start of the walk - the next photo was taken after we'd completed the walk to the second town and back) which the previous day the girls said had been enormous:

The southern start of the walk

Riomaggiore Station below the town

The wall and pedestrian tunnel (upper level) and rail tunnel (lower level)  

The path cut into the rock face 

Cafe with seating on grating built out over the sea

Manarola station and town from the walkway

Manarola looking seaward

Manarola looking landward

Riomaggiore looking back from the path before sun-up

Riomaggiore's main street looking landward

Riomaggiore port below the railway station

Riomaggiore port looking landward

Finally here is a typical view of the terraces, many of which are no more than 2 metres wide, which are typical of the land around the Cinque Terre which is the steepest in Liguria and which used to support 140,000 farmers and which now supports less than 14,000.  Many terraces have fallen into disuse and the walls have collapsed.  Once one wall collapses there is a domino effect and a whole hillside can slide down into the sea.  Ten days after I took the following photo four Australian tourists tackling the panoramic Trail of Love were seriously injured by cascading boulders, while 1,000 people were evacuated last October when mud surged through two of the area's five villages.

Terraces