Santuario di Montenero

There is a particular kind of traveler — I am one of them — who arrives in a famously crowded place and immediately starts looking for the way up and out of it. In Riomaggiore that way is the path to the Santuario di Nostra Signora di Montenero, the sanctuary that sits on the ridge some three hundred and forty meters above the village. Most of the day-trippers stay down by the harbour, queuing for focaccia and photographing the stacked pastel houses. I went looking for the trail head, found it behind the upper part of the village, and started climbing.

The climb

The path switchbacks up through vineyard terraces and Mediterranean scrub, and it is steep enough that within ten minutes I had stopped talking and was concentrating on breathing. There is also, for the less masochistic, a small road and a shuttle, but I am stubborn about earning a view on foot, and Lia — who is more sensible — humored me. The reward arrives gradually: with every switchback the village shrinks below, the harbour resolves into a toy, and the coastline opens out in both directions. Rosemary and wild fennel grew along the path, and the cicadas were deafening in the heat.

The sanctuary itself is modest — a sober stone church, parts of it medieval, dedicated to the Madonna and tended for centuries by the people of Riomaggiore. It has been a place of pilgrimage since long before the Cinque Terre became a UNESCO site and a bucket-list destination. Inside it is cool and dim and quiet, a real contrast to the carnival down by the water. But I will be honest: it is the terrace outside that stops you. From up here you can see the entire eastern stretch of the Cinque Terre coast, the headlands stacking away one behind another toward Portovenere and the islands beyond, the sea a flat hammered blue all the way to the horizon.

The view that recalibrates everything

I have stood at a lot of viewpoints in this part of Italy, and this is the one I would send a friend to. The famous shots of the villages are taken from sea level or from the harbours, looking along the coast. From Montenero you look down on the whole arrangement — the terraces that generations carved into near-vertical cliffs, the thin road, the railway threading in and out of tunnels, Riomaggiore tucked into its ravine. The scale of human effort represented by those terraces only makes sense from up here. People built this landscape by hand, stone by stone, and from the sanctuary terrace you grasp just how absurd and magnificent that was.

We had brought bread, tomatoes and a bottle of the local white, and we ate sitting on the wall with our legs hanging over the drop, in no hurry whatsoever to go back down. A pair of paragliders launched from somewhere along the ridge and drifted out over the sea below us, which I found mildly enviable and entirely terrifying. The light was beginning its long slow turn toward evening and the sea was changing colour by the minute.

Go in the morning if you want the climb in shade, or in late afternoon for the light, but bring water either way — there is little along the path. You can descend the same way, or continue along the high ridge trails toward the other villages if your legs are willing. Either way, the Santuario di Montenero is the antidote to the harbour crush, and the place where the Cinque Terre finally made complete sense to me.