#5 Villages on the sea: Portovenere in Liguria

On the Liguria coast tucked on the Northwest of Italy located the most exclusive villages in the country. There are Portofino and Portovenere, the two most romantic and expensive places to have a second home for Italians; and then there are Cinque Terre (the five fishing villages that until recently were inaccessible on land).
We went to Liguria for Cinque Terre. With the limited information (plus some good-will imagination perhaps) about the place, we hope to found solitude and a good hike. Yet things turned out to be quite different at the end.
Nowadays it seems that there are many easy ways to access Cinque Terre: one can drive to each individual one of them, or hire a taxi boat to approach from the sea, or even easier, hop on the train that whistles through all five villages. We planned to walk the 4 hours hiking trail that links the villages until we found out on arrival that the trail was closed due to a landslide the night before. We had no choice but to take the train and found us among the swamps of tourists. Alas, clearly, the isolation was no more. The villages are indeed beautiful, cliff-hugging and gravity-defying, yet we spent the whole time trying to readjust our expectation. If we could do our hike, we probably would have felt completely different about the place.

We did find solitude, luckily and quite unexpectedly, in Portovenere, the tiny village we randomly chose to stay. The village was further south on the coast and the off-season rendered the place a feeling of a lost paradise that completely belongs to the local. It was set on a small peninsular. Pastel-colored houses were built to stacked on top of each other. Our hotel Genio was incorporated in the watching towers at the gate of ancient village so we had a commanding view of the whole terrain. The narrow main street (more like a footpath by American standard) led us to the 13-century San Pietro, a stunning Gothic church perching on the tip of the peninsula with black and white marble. Beyond that, nothing but vast ocean and rugged coastline.
We ended up extending our stay in Portovenere because we simply loved to be in that place. We checked out before the weekend when the innkeeper told us that many Italian weekenders were on their way. The solitude that we had turned out to be simply a stroke of luck.