pisa and cinque terre

If you’re new here, I’ve been sharing photos of my honeymoon in Italy until the wedding ’season’ starts up again. This blog is fairly new so there are a couple of engagement shoots up, otherwise my best wedding work is on the main site

We left Florence early in the morning and hopped on a train to Pisa. We only stayed for a few hours, and that would be all we would need. We dropped our bags off and walked through the city to the Piazza dei Miracoli to see the leaning tower. It was a bit strange, the city was fairly quiet and the streets relatively empty compared to Rome and Florence. The Piazza was bustling with people however.We stopped for lunch at a restaurant neaby and hopped back on the train to Cinque Terre. We got to Manarola, the second of the five lands – and had a bit of trouble finding where we were supposed to stay. We didnt get too alarmed, but our bags sure were getting heavy already. We finally got it figured out and got someone to walk us up to our room. The villages that make up Cinque Terre are all built into the side of the coast. That means the cities are more vertical than horizontal and so the uphill climb to our room (with our big backpacks on), seemed to take forever. When we finally got up to our cozy little room, the sweat was literally pouring off of us. We dropped our bags, opened up the doors to the balcony…and suddenly, the long hike up was totally totally worth it. We cleaned ourselves up, got changed and headed out to explore the city a bit. Everything seemed to move in slow motion here, there was no rushing around, no hustle and bustle. awesome.Being right on the Mediterranean, the restaurants in Cinque Terre all had lots of fresh seafood on the menu. We headed back to the first village, Riomaggiore to get dinner, but not before watching the sunset from the Via dell’Amore – the first (and easiest) part of the trails connecting each of the five villages.There are three ways to get between each of the five villages – train, ferry, or the trails. The trails between each of the villages takes about five hours to hike from end to end, each trail getting progressively more difficult to hike as you reach each city. The first part, the Via dell’Amore was relatively flat and paved. We’d spend the next day exploring the other villages of Cinque Terre, but we wouldn’t be getting on the train or the ferry…

mike