Cinque Terre: The Five Wonders!

A view of village Vernazza

Cinque (pronounced as Chin-quay) Terre, which means Five Lands, are five little seaside villages:Riomaggiore, Manarola, Vernazza, Corniglia and Monterosso.These are famous for their natural beauty, scenic trails and beaches.

 

Five small villages, mainly home to fishermen and farmers, are famous for bright colored homes that are raised with massive retaining walls. Their local cuisine is equally famous.

In the olden days, fishermen painted their homes with bright colors, so that they could identify their homes while  heading back from the sea. This unique trend made the coastline a magnificent one.  

While planning our tour to Italy, people specifically mentioned to pay Cinque Terre a visit. As mentioned in my blog earlier about Pisa, we booked a tour from "Italy On a Budget Tours" to see this place.  

Cinque Terre became a famous  tourist destination somewhere around in the 1970's when it received developed railroutes . La Spezia, is the main station here. Local trains run to all five villages from this station. We visited Riomaggiore, Manarola and Vernazza.  What a sight they were!

Cinque Terre is famous for its unique dishes. We tried Farinata, which is a bread made of chickpea flour and Olive oil. They served it with a mouth watering pesto sauce.

Cinnamon Gelato, is a must try when you go there. You will find a number of exciting, local flavors here. 

Photo taken at Riomaggiore

All five towns are so beautiful that you can spend hours and hours  adoring  their  beauty. We could not resist our temptation to click our photo with such a scenic, splendid backdrop!

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

I first heard about the Tower of Pisa, when I was in middle school. While learning about gravity, we were told that Galileo dropped two objects of different masses from top of the Pisa Tower and observed that they fell on ground at the same time. He proved that objects fall at same speed independent of their weight. Since then the tower was on my bucket list.  


While planning our Italy tour we were highly recommended by friends to visit Cinque Terre also. We had planned only 2 days in Florence and we wanted to cover too many things in that limited time frame.

While looking for options to cover Cinque Terre, we found a unique tour organized by "Italy On a Budget Tours". They have one tour, which covers Leaning Tower of Pisa and Cingue Terre in one day. We booked this tour in advance from travel portal called Viator.com. We did this tour on 26th of May 2019. This allowed us to spare 25th of May for local attractions in Florence.

Tip: The tour mentioned above operates only on certain days of the week. Please do plan accordingly. 



How to get there:

During our stay in Florence, we stayed in Hotel Golf, which was less than 1 km away from Firenze Santa Maria Novella railway station. Our tour started from this station at 7 am. Entire travel was by trains. Our first stop was at Leaning tower of Pisa. 

Visit to Pisa:

We first stopped at PISA. Three attractions here: The must see Leaning tower of Pisa, the Baptistry, and Duomo di Pisa (Pisa Cathedral). We reached to this place very early (at 845 am or so). We went straight to ticketing window and bought tickets for Pisa Tower only. (Note that tickets are not included in the tour price). 

You are not allowed to take any bags inside the tower. You have to keep them in the lockers which are next to the ticketing window. Fees for locker usage are included in the entrance tickets.

Tips: 
Make sure you reach early in the morning and beat the crowd. When we came down from Pisa Tower, there was a huge queue for the lockers, which were very limited in number. 
When you buy tickets, you have to chose time-slot that you think you can enter the tower.  

It took us only 15 minutes of so to get on the top of the tower (above 7th level). The height of tower is 55 meters above the ground. That is roughly equivalent to 18 story residential building. 

On the day we went, the weather was very nice and clear. We got nice 360 degree clicks. 

What we learned:
It took about 200 years (from 12th to 14th century) to build this tower. When construction started, it was stopped as foundation began to sink due to lesser soil bearing capacity on one side. Later on, after 100 years of so, the construction was resumed assuming that soil underneath was settled by then. However, it continued leaning on one side. By 1990, it leaned at an angle of 5.5 degree. From 1993 to 2001, they started reinforcing foundation and structure and hence tilt was reduced to ~4 degrees. 

Dome Shaped Baptistry

Our visit to Pisa was memorable! Comfortable weather and clear sky was an icing on the cake. After visit to Tower of Pisa, we headed back to train station to start our journey to Cineuq Terre. See my post about Cinque Terre for more information. 

Tip: 
As I mentioned earlier, make sure you reach early in the morning to beat the rush and spend quality time at this monument. 

Colosseum, Rome

During the summer of 2019 (24th of May), I had an opportunity to visit Rome along with my wife and few other like minded friends. Our first tourist attraction spot was Colosseum!

How to get there:
Colosseum is less than 2km away from the train station, Roma Termini.  We stayed close to the station, in hotel Augusta Lucilla Palace. Colosseum was at a walking distance from our hotel.

Tickets:
We went there late in the afternoon. We didn't have any pre-booked tours, however at Colosseum we booked a tour through an agency as many agents approached tourists with intriguing bits of information. Bargaining with the "localites" is a must as they come up with jaw dropping prices for us tourists. We got a great deal for the tour of 6.

The tour:
A lady guided us throughout the tour. She did a great job! She had deep knowledge about the structures and briefed us with their historical backgrounds. The place was beautiful in it's own way and we feel lucky to have visited Colosseum once in our life.

What we learned:
It was built sometime in 100 BC. As you can make out from the picture, it is a gigantic oval shaped amphitheatre. Local marble, called Traventino, was used to build this structure. This structure has 80 arches in total, which served as entrance gates for the Colosseum. Of these, 72 arches are open for public and 8 arches are reserved for VIPs.
The main arena is 72 x 44 meters and is surrounded by a  6 level seating, which can hold  over 50000 people. The lowest level was reserved for emperors and VIPs.
Colosseum was mainly used for Gladiator fighting. When it was opened for the very first time,  games were held for more than 100 consecutive days. 
In those days, many soldiers chose to  or were forced to become gladiators,who fought with each other , animals or even a  combination of both. The person who loses the game would be killed depending on the votes from the audience and the emperor. The votes from the audience were clearly conveyed in the form of yelling either by saying "kill !kill!" or "live! live!".

We were impressed with the sheer size of this structure and detailing of the design elements. It was interesting to learn about the tradition of gladiator fights. It was fun to watch Gladiator moviie (2000), after returning home from Italy.

Tips:
Please reserve 3 hours for this tour. Takes about 75 minutes to complete Colosseum guided tour. Typically, when you take guided tour package from a travel agency, they cover Colosseum, Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum. We reached late to the venue. Hence we did not have time to cover Palatine Hill and Roman Forum. We had to give it a miss. Our agent was kind enough to offer those to us on the next day for free, but we simply did not have time.