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

Belforte

I've never showed you the tiny town in which we stayed.  The village of Belforte belongs to the municipality of Radicondoli, in the province of Siena, region Toscana.  It is small.  It has a ristorante, post office and a small shop.  There is a church.

There is, however more to it than that.  Belforte has a long history.  It is the ancestral home of the powerful Belforti family of Volterra. The castle is first mentioned during the 12 C and in a document of 1208 it is cited in the will of Ildebrando Aldobrandesco where he bequeaths it to his son Ildebrandino together with other territory and castles. In 1221, Belforte numbered 260 heads of the family and, together with Radicondoli, swore fealty to the Republic of Sienna. Despite this, Sienna and the Aldobrandeschi continued to contend for possession of Belforte, but in 1301 it became definitively the property of Sienna. From then on, Belforte shared the destiny of Radicondoli and in 1555 it was incorporated into the Grand Duchy of the Medici . In 1676, the auditor Gherardini notes that Belforte had a main street paved partly in brick and partly in stone, running from one town gate to the other. Among the public buildings were the Palace of Justice, a reservoir, a fountain including a public washhouse and an animal trough, a kiln, the schoolmaster's house, a pilgrims' hospice, the parish church and the Church of Santa Croce.

So this is Belforte as we saw it:

The Main Street: Via Santa Croce 

Ristorante La Mura

A 'side street' leading from the Main Street to Villa Belforte

The southern end of Via Santa Croce

Villa Belforte

Just to show that The Nighthawk really was there

Via Santa Croce looking northwards by day

It's hard to tell which walls belong to which house much of the time.

San Jimmy Banana

I have absolutely no idea how it happened but when Wendy and Martin (my New Zealand Family), Carol (my wife) and Catherine (a dear friend to us all) went to Italy in 1992 we all fell for San Gimignano and one amongst us christened the place San Jimmy Banana.  For us that has been its name ever since.  It was probably the most commercially aware of the tourist towns of Tuscany twenty years ago so although I've been back since then the changes have not been quite so great as, for example, in Volterra.  Having said that one now has to pay to go into the Duomo and no photos are allowed there either.  The queue outside the only public toilet I saw inside the walls  was long (cafés are obliged to let the public use their facilities) but at least the outflow from it was not pouring down the street as it was last time.  All in all it is still a beautiful place with a marvellous history and the fact that all we tourists want to go and see it is testament to that.

Notice on the door of the public toilets at the car park below the city

The Southern Entrance Gate

Just inside the main gate

Handbags everywhere and in every colour, shape and size 

The 'main' street

Looking back towards the main gate

One of the Antony Gormley** statues looks on 

Wild boar are everywhere usually with something stuck in their mouth. 

The main square with yet another Antony Gormley statue

A little potter's studio or rather a potter's little studio

with a splendid trades sign

Yet another Gormley way up high....very high

....that high

Our lunchtime café - superb formagio

The street out to the North 

An absolutely splendid purveyor of goodies

The terrazzo where Wendy and I sat and listened to a musician (and bought his CD) 20 years ago.  It was lunchtime so we had the square to ourselves  (The siesta seems to be a thing of the past in towns like this).   Now the terazzo is fenced off and is the entrance to the Duomo and only available to those who pay.  The inside of this Duomo is completely covered in frescos.

**There are (or were) Antony Gormley statues everywhere.

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

I Forgot the Spa

I forgot in the last post to mention that, at the Villa, there was also a hot spa with a wonderful view and lots of resting places for the drinking type of bubbly as well as the underwater kind.

Villa Belforte

The Holiday in Italy is fast falling into my mental history archives.  There are still more posts to come but I haven't yet shown you the beautiful villa in which we stayed.  The village of Belforte belongs to the municipality of Radicondoli, in the province of Siena and the region of Toscana.  It has a population of about 226 and, so far as I can gather, the church has a Mass every day.

The Villa Belforte has recently been completely renovated.    The villa is on three floors: the ground level at the back and front being completely different (the villa is built on a hillside).  The front entrance is on the middle floor and the large patio area on the lower floor.   The website shows as much as I can but here are a few of my photos:

The entrance hall with the library/television room doors

The magnificent (and totally impregnable) front door

The stairs to the bedrooms on the top floor - presumably handrails would have been aesthetically displeasing

The lounge area on the lower floor  

Kitchen and dining area on the lower floor

The patio and garden area

The seating area built out of the hillside with it's macnificent views

'My' bedroom (with ensuite of course) 

The view from my bathroom window (which may eventually merit its own post).