Telegrafo Trail

Everyone does the Sentiero Azzurro, the blue coastal path linking the five villages, and for good reason — it’s beautiful and it’s the reason most people come to the Cinque Terre at all. But after our second visit to the region, a local guide at a trattoria in Vernazza told us, with a little bit of contempt I found funny in retrospect, that the real trail was the one up on the ridge, the Alta Via, and specifically the stretch near the old Telegrafo tower. So the next trip, we went up instead of along.

It’s a completely different kind of hike. Where the coastal path hugs the water and passes through village after village, the ridge route climbs into chestnut forest and open scrubland high above everything, following the line of an old semaphore telegraph system that once relayed messages down the coast before modern communication existed — hence the name. You lose the sea for long stretches, then round a bend and it’s suddenly there again, laid out flat and enormous a thousand meters below, the villages reduced to little clusters of orange roof tiles.

The physical difference matters too. This isn’t the crowded, sometimes literally queued, coastal path with its entry checkpoints and per-person fees. We went on a Tuesday in early June and passed maybe six other hikers over four hours, mostly Italians and a pair of German trail runners who blew past us looking disgustingly unbothered by the climbs. There’s a real solitude to it that the coastal path, for all its beauty, simply can’t offer anymore given how popular it’s become.

We came down into Corniglia at the end of the day, legs shaking a little on the final descent, and ordered focaccia and beer at the first place we saw, which tasted better than any meal we’d had lower down all week — pure hunger cooking, probably, but I’ve thought about that focaccia more than I’ve thought about most restaurant meals since. The trail isn’t marked as clearly as the coastal path, so bring an offline map or the CAI trail app, and proper shoes; it’s rockier and steeper than it looks from the water.

When to go: Late spring or early autumn, when the forest sections aren’t unbearably hot and the exposed ridge stretches don’t leave you fully exposed to midsummer sun.