Very easily, it turns out.

That’s not fair, as most of the day was a delightful train ride from Cinque Terre to Venice. The kids and Dwayne enjoy the train ride as much as I do and it felt like the transportation equivalent of a spa. After our 5 hours of first-class heaven, there was just a 15-minute walk from the station to our hotel for the night. Wes went from blissed to pissed (more in the London vernacular of “tired”) and elected to stay in the hotel rather than go into Venice for dinner. With all the discussion of whether or not he’d stay behind, we missed the first bus and then got to Venice later than we wished, keeping us from getting to The Tiramisu Place That Piper Remember With Love From Three Years Ago before it closed. While I love just wandering Venetian streets and over bridges, it is not an enjoyable group activity. The four of us had a dinner that was pretty good in a not bad location and then wasted late hours trying to find the right kind of postcard box to mail our letters before leaving Italy for good. We returned way past princess time and well into pumpkin hours to a room that the five of us had to share before catching an early bus the next morning.

All that to say, the pictures may say a thousand words, but they’re pretty much lying. And there are no pictures with my three children since Wes stayed behind to play video games and Piper won’t have her picture taken.

I’m buying myself a hanging basket when we get back.

…it will be from a high-speed, first-class train up and down Italy. Once we left Amalfi, we took the ferry down to Solerno, and then a train to Rome.  Later, the train took us from Rome to Cinque Terre.  Our last leg of Italy took us from Monterosso (Cinque Terre) to Mestre-Venice, probably the most relaxing travel I can imagine. First, I embrace everything that all five of us love, and these trains make the top ten. How often do you travel 3-6 hours and come out completely refreshed and not needing to pee? Second, my happy place is definitely the calm of a quiet train car with few people and roomy seats, with bucolic views at almost every point, giving me mental and physical space to compose posts.  I have no conception for a book, but at least I know where it would be born.

Oh, and if I ever want to taste hell again, I will take the Circumvesuviana train from Naples to Sorrento again. The ying & yang of Italian trains!

Admittedly, I won’t sell all my worldly goods to move to Cinque Terre (CHINK-eh Tair-uh), even if I could take loads of Italian train rides, but I will definitely be going back to spend more time trekking further afield.

The “Five Lands”, as translated, are five former fishing villages all perched on the mountainous eastern Italian coastline. They are beautifully quaint, but their real draw is the hiking trails connecting the towns. For a long time, Cinque Terre has been more agricultural and touristy than fishy, and most of the boats today are used for excursions, not for the catch of the day.

There is technically a road by which you can reach CT, but most guests come in by train or boat. Lots of cruise lines and other groups make it a day stop, but adventuring would have to be compromised to do so. And I had adventuring to do!

The towns are connected by one main path that requires a parks pass, broken into 4 unequal segments. While they are not easy trails, they are considerably more moderate than the expert trails that wind their way up and down rocky hills to smaller hamlets. The pass comes with an unlimited day pass for the train, with the idea you could go from one end to the other, and then ride back.  In 2014, the two southernmost towns lost their main paths to landslides, making the train or alternative paths necessary.

We had an ideal location in Monterosso town, with a short walk with luggage to our hotel, a long stretch of beach with a Colossal Neptune holding up a cliffside, good restaurants and shops, and more importantly, laundry. And being the northernmost town, it was an ideal spot to start our trek.

Our of cursory politeness, I invited Wes and Piper to join us. Then Kyla, Dwayne and I set out to conquer Cinque Terre on the drizzliest day of our stay. I prepped for this, realizing later that I had just become my father, with practical convertible easy-dry pants, a rain jacket, my sun-rain-mosquito-netting hat, and no style. 

Is Cinque Terre a hike with amazing views, or great views you trek to?  Either way, our rocky up-and-down path took us past waterfalls, through vineyards, orange and lemon groves, treescapes, over arched stone bridges, and up cliffs overlooking a turquoise Mediterranean where, I swear, I could almost see fish swimming. The paths included lots of steps and rocks, which kept the mud down.  It took us less than 2 hours to get to the next town, which was a great place to have focaccia-as-street food before heading to the next town, which was oddly both more kilometers and less time. We took a break from the rain by calling it lunchtime, so I could pour over the maps and choose the next route as a workaround for the next two closed main paths.

Kyla was a trouper who did about 7.5 km on the longer, tougher trails with us through rain and mud. The girl knows when to quit while she’s ahead, though, and took the train by herself back to the hotel*, and Dwayne and I rode to the next town to avoid the closed 3rd segment. But between the last two towns, there was a 1.4km trail that I wanted to do to complete our Cinque Terre day. The map rated it “moderate”, the same as our first two trails, so easy-peasy. Right?

We spent the first half of that trail vertically crawling.  One might generously call vertical crawling “climbing”, but no, it wasn’t that dignified. I felt more justified when we got to the peak and saw this sign:

I immediately embraced the “expert excursionist” moniker, and shared it with the newly engaged couple we met on the way down. You never know when you’ll meet fellow excursionists and we had the most lovely chat, as we descended to the town of Riomaggiore together. They were staying there and showed us the good gelato and the best spot for pictures.

By the end of the day, Dwayne and I had 29,000 steps (19km), just a thousand shy of our Petra record.

The trails are supposed to be fully reopened in 2026. Who will be an expert excursionist with me in a few years?

*To tell tales: Piper and Wes can leave a hotel, navigate to two grocery stores, get lunch, and find their way back to eat junk food and play video games all afternoon. Kyla can follow the couple we connect with to get on the train and off at the right stop, then get so lost in her book that she can quote important passages almost verbatim, give a character analysis, and discuss if and what tropes are used, before texting us to say she can’t find the hotel that is 50 meters in front of her. We all use our brains differently!

We didn’t improve family harmony by making this tour mandatory, but it seemed sinful to have 5 days in Rome and not see the Vatican.

The smallest country in the world has the second-largest museum, after the Lourve, indicating the power, reach, and wealth of the papacy over the centuries. This niggles a factoid loose, that part of the golden extremism came as a counter to the plainness of Martin Luther’s Protestantism. It is easier to wow people with mighty buildings and a sensory overload of ostentatious accouterments. (Oh, crap, did I just revisit America, 2016?!?)

But luckily, our children’s religious affiliations cannot be bought with lots of boring art! They sell their souls only for good Wifi and gelato.

Truthfully, which of these screams “Jesus saves!” to you?

Actually, as soon as you realize that the Vatican museums are not about uplifting the Christian faith, or even Catholic traditions, and are really just showing off all the worldly goods collected over centuries, it becomes much more fun. [Honestly, one of the dreariest things to do in Europe is trying to appreciate a plethora of medieval religious art. Architecture, yes. Art, no.]

These pieces are interesting. The word is that Michaelangelo was deeply inspired by the movement of the left and right* statues and the perfectionism of the middle. These torsos inspired figures in the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, and the face of the Apollo was a model for one of his depictions of Christ.

Oh, and the ubiquitous fig leaf! Check out how many I captured in one shot! And, yes, they were added later during particularly censorous periods.**

The museums lead to the pope’s personal conclave, known as the Sistine Chapel. No cameras are allowed in the place-with-the-famous-ceiling, but Internet has its ways. Honestly, after passing through all sorts of rooms that looked like this,

…it was a little harder to think this was as singular as its reputation.

What does impress me is that this is Michelangelo’s debut fresco, and he had only done a few public paintings before this, though he had an impressive sculpture resumé. To go from chisel to paintbrush, and find that this is what comes out of your palette, is pretty impressive.

The Chapel shoots you out away from the third stop: St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest church in the world. It is enormous and I actually liked walking in and seeing that it was not taken up with benches, showing just how big the footprint was. I haven’t bothered to figure out what separates major (of which there are four and all are in Rome) and minor basilica (18,000 of them lurking around the world), but of course, St. Peter’s is major in every way. It is proud of its size and on the floor are plaques marking how other enormous churches stack up. I will admit that the art isn’t dreary; the basilica is light and airy, and it felt more uplifting than heavily sacred.

* * * *

A little extra: Google Maps cracked me up as we mapped our way home from St. Peter’s. While we could walk back to our hotel, we were still in a different country, as noted at the bottom of the map. I think what I most like about the Vatican is that compared to The Holy See, Americans aren’t special snowflakes at all!

*“The Belvedere Torso, which means “the beautiful torso,” could arguably be one of the most important statues in history. This is no small feat for a statue that is lacking legs, arms, and even a head.” This link mentions further influences, including it becoming the base of the famous The Thinker sculpture.

**Perhaps a fig leaf is preferable to castration, but I do think it leads to far more wondering, “What’s under there?” [Underwear, if you are up for an elementary school joke.] Here’s a fun factoid I came across the other day. Penises really are smaller on Greek (and therefore Roman) ancient statues. It is counterculture to today, but modest genitalia symbolized restraint and wisdom. Only the most base of creatures, like satyrs and barbarians, would be portrayed comedically large, signifying all appetite and no refinement. And now you know.