Campiglia

Campiglia isn’t on most people’s radar even after they’ve done the Cinque Terre villages, Portovenere, maybe even Palmaria. It sits up above Portovenere, reachable by a small local bus that winds up switchbacks for maybe twenty minutes, and I only went because a woman running our B&B told us, almost as an aside, that the view from up there put the famous coastal trail overlooks to shame.

She wasn’t exaggerating. The hamlet itself is tiny — a cluster of stone houses, a church, a bar that doubles as the town’s only real gathering point — but the position is extraordinary. From the ridge just past the village you can see the entire arc of the Cinque Terre coast fading into blue haze to the north, Portovenere and Palmaria laid out below to the south, and on a clear day the mountains of Corsica sitting faint on the horizon, which genuinely surprised me the first time someone pointed it out and I realized they weren’t joking.

We wandered off the main lane and got a little lost among the terraced vineyards below the hamlet — this is Sciacchetrà country, the sweet wine the whole region is known for, and the vines here are worked the old way, on narrow stone terraces that must be brutal to maintain. An older man saw us poking around near his gate, said something in dialect I only half caught, and then just handed us two jars of his own honey through the kitchen window, waving off payment until Lia insisted. That kind of unbothered generosity is something I’ve only ever run into in small hill towns like this, never in the villages down on the coast where everyone’s a little more transactional out of sheer tourist fatigue.

There’s a trailhead near Campiglia that connects down to the coastal path system, and if you’re fit and have most of a day, walking down into Riomaggiore from up here instead of doing it in reverse feels like a much better use of gravity. We didn’t have the legs for it that day, so we just sat at the one bar with a beer and watched the light change over the water for an hour, which honestly might have been the better choice.

When to go: Come in the shoulder months, April or October, when the vineyard terraces are either blooming or turning color and the bus up isn’t packed with day-trippers.