Levanto

I’d been in the Cinque Terre for three days when I walked north from Monterosso along the trail to Levanto, and the transition was something close to relief. Not because the five villages are not worth everything they’re credited with — they are — but because after three days of high-season crowds and restaurant queues and the persistent pressure of managing a very famous place, the sight of a proper town with a supermarket and a long beach and cafés that weren’t overwhelmed by tourists produced an involuntary relaxation of something I hadn’t known was tense.

Levanto sits just outside the northern boundary of the Cinque Terre National Park, on a bay that opens more generously than any of the five villages’ tiny harbors. The beach is four hundred meters of actual sand — not much by Adriatic standards but extraordinary after the rock and concrete of the Cinque Terre — and in the morning before the beach clubs set up their furniture, you can walk it with your shoes off and have most of it to yourself. The sea here runs slightly calmer than at Monterosso, sheltered by the headland, and the water temperature in June and September is exactly what you want it to be.

The old town is small but properly medieval — a center of narrow lanes and arched passages and the occasional loggia that dates from the period when Levanto was a significant Genoese coastal town with its own commercial ambitions. The Church of Sant’Andrea has a facade in the black-and-white striped marble of the Ligurian Gothic style, severe and handsome, and its interior is dark and cool in a way that invites you to sit down and stay for a minute. The castle ruins above the town are accessible by a short path and give views toward Monterosso and the Cinque Terre coastline that clarify the geography in ways the trail doesn’t.

The eating in Levanto is considerably more relaxed than in the five villages, where the pressure of tourist traffic has pushed prices up and quality in some places down. Here the restaurants have regular customers and the menus rotate with what’s available rather than what’s most photographable. I found a trattoria near the central piazza where the pesto trofiette was what pesto trofiette should be — the sauce made with Ligurian basil that’s smaller and more fragrant than the Genovese variety, green beans in the pasta for bulk and sweetness, a piece of potato for texture. The price was half what I’d paid for an inferior version in Vernazza. I ate there twice.

The surf at Levanto is a local secret of modest proportions — when the swell runs from the northwest, which it does a handful of times each autumn, the bay picks up small but rideable waves that bring out the town’s small surfing contingent. I didn’t surf, but I watched from the beach in October while eating a panino from the bakery on the main street, and the contrast between the serene medieval tower behind and the three people attempting Italian surfing in the middle distance had a quality of gentle surrealism that I found pleasing.

From Levanto, the train south runs every twenty minutes or so and deposits you in any of the five villages in under fifteen minutes, which means you can use the town as a genuinely comfortable base — longer beach, quieter accommodation, lower prices — and day-trip into the Cinque Terre proper when the spirit moves you.

When to go: September is the finest month here — the summer crowds have thinned, the sea is still warm from three months of sun, the old town is occupied by Italians on late-season holiday, and the restaurants have their best rhythms. June runs a close second. The surf season runs October through November for anyone interested in that particular kind of rough morning.