The trail starts in Monterosso with a set of stone steps that seem fine until they don’t. Within ten minutes my calves are announcing themselves. The air is already warm but the breeze off the Ligurian Sea keeps pulling salt across my face, and I keep licking my lips without thinking about it. Olive trees lean away from the cliff like they’ve been told a secret by the wind and never recovered.
Above me, the terraced vineyards climb in these impossible stacked rows. Someone built these walls by hand, stone by stone, probably centuries ago. I try to imagine that kind of patience. I can’t. I stop to reload the camera and notice my hands are shaking a little from the climb. The Pentax feels heavier on a trail like this. It always does. But putting it away is not something I know how to do when the light is behaving like this, falling sideways through the olive branches and turning the water below into something between silver and glass.
There’s almost nobody on the path at this hour. One older man passed me going the other direction, walking stick in hand, and nodded like we were the only two people who understood something. Maybe we were. The towns are still waking up. I can smell coffee from somewhere below, or maybe I’m inventing that because I want it to be true. A lizard shoots across the warm stone in front of my shoe and vanishes into a crack in the vineyard wall.
Vernazza appears slowly, in pieces. First a church tower. Then the pastel stack of houses crowding the harbor. I sit on a flat rock and let the camera rest on my knee. My shirt is stuck to my back. The sea is doing that thing where it looks completely still from a distance but you know, if you were down there, it would be pulling at your ankles. I think about how my father used to say the Ligurian coast was the one place Italy didn’t need to try. It just was. I didn’t understand that when I was young. I’m starting to.
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