Cinque Terre, and the road that was never built

Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore sit on a stretch of the Ligurian coast so steep that, for most of their history, the easiest way to get from one to the next was by boat or on foot along the terraced hillside, not by road. A single narrow railway line, blasted through the cliffs in the late nineteenth century, eventually connected them by tunnel. A proper coast road never followed. There is still no motorway threading the five villages together, and the car park for visitors sits well outside the historic centres, because there is nowhere inside them for a car to go.

This is not an accident of underdevelopment. The terrain simply refused the option. The hillsides above the villages are cut into thousands of dry-stone terraces, built up over centuries to hold enough soil for vines and olive trees on slopes too steep to farm any other way, and the villages themselves are wedged into the only flat ground available, at the mouths of streams where the cliffs briefly relent. Building a road through that landscape would have meant unpicking the terracing that fed the villages in the first place.

Arriving the way the villages expect you to

Which is why arriving by sea still makes the most sense of the place. From the water, the logic of the Cinque Terre is immediately visible in a way it rarely is from a train window or a coastal footpath: pastel houses stacked above small harbours, vines climbing impossibly steep slopes behind them, and almost no sign of a road anywhere in view. A ship sailing this stretch of the Ligurian Riviera, whether it puts in at La Spezia for an excursion to the villages or simply passes the coast on its way towards Genoa or the French Riviera, sees Cinque Terre roughly as its builders always intended it to be seen: as a coastline, not a road trip.

La Spezia, the naval town at the southern end of the stretch, makes the practical gateway. From there, the villages are reached by the coastal railway or by local boats that call at each harbour in turn, which is close to how residents travelled between them for most of the area's history and remains, by common agreement, the more scenic option. Further along the same coast, Portofino performs a similar trick on a grander scale: a fishing village turned upmarket retreat, tucked into a cove that a road only reaches by a long and winding descent, which is part of why it stayed small.

The rest of the riviera, from the deck

A cruise along this coast typically pairs Cinque Terre with other calls that share its logic of a coastline shaped more by water than by roads: Florence and Pisa reached inland from Livorno, Corsica across the water, or the French Riviera further west, where Nice and Monaco perform their own version of a coast that resisted being flattened for traffic.

A longer sailing can combine the Ligurian coast with a call further south towards Rome, giving a sense of how much the Italian coastline changes character between Liguria's cliffs and the flatter approach to Civitavecchia.

A third option runs the other way, pairing this coastline with Corsica and the Balearic island of Menorca before turning towards Monaco: a reminder that Liguria's cliffs are one end of a much longer stretch of Mediterranean coast that never quite made peace with the motor car.

Go in late spring or September if the itinerary allows a choice: the villages are busy year-round, but the coastal path between them, when it is open, is far more pleasant to walk without the height of summer's heat, and the harbours are easier to enjoy without quite so much competition for a table.