La Spezia

Almost nobody plans a trip to La Spezia. It’s where you change trains, buy your Cinque Terre park card, maybe grab a coffee before the local rail line pulls out toward Riomaggiore. I did that exact thing on my first visit — treated it as fifteen minutes of dead time — and it took a second trip, when we got stuck there for a few hours because of a missed connection, to actually look at the place.

It’s a real Italian city, which after a few days of Cinque Terre’s villages starts to feel almost novel. La Spezia is home to one of Italy’s main naval bases, and you feel that immediately on the waterfront — grey warships tied up alongside pleasure boats, a naval museum with actual submarines you can walk through, and none of the aggressive cuteness that Vernazza or Manarola have leaned into for the tourist economy. People here have jobs that aren’t about tourism, which changes the texture of a place more than any guidebook admits.

We ended up eating at a no-frills trattoria a few blocks off the water, the kind of place with a handwritten menu and a TV playing football in the corner, and had mesciua — a local bean-and-grain soup, chickpeas and wheat and beans in olive oil, that I’d never heard of before and that apparently is specifically a La Spezia dish, born out of dockworkers scavenging spilled grain sacks from the port centuries ago. It’s humble food with a real story behind it, which is more than I can say for most of what gets served up as “authentic Ligurian cuisine” in villages built around day-trippers.

If you have a spare morning, the Friday market along Via Garibaldi is worth catching — stalls selling everything from farm cheese to cheap sunglasses, spread over several blocks, entirely local in character. And the walk up to Castello San Giorgio gives you a view over the whole gulf that rivals anything you’ll get from the coastal trail, minus the entrance fee to the park and the crowds fighting for photo spots.

When to go: Any season works since La Spezia isn’t weather-dependent the way the coastal villages are, but a Friday visit lets you catch the market — check ahead, as it occasionally moves for holidays.