Rethinking Tourism With the Renewal of a Beloved Italian Path

[Pelican Press 0]

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Rethinking Tourism With the Renewal of a Beloved Italian Path

In Riomaggiore, one of the five vertigo-inducing villages that make up Cinque Terre, which hug the steep cliffs of Italy’s northwestern coast, just about everyone has a memory of the Via dell’Amore, or Love’s Lane.

With breathtaking sunset views, the seacoast trail to neighboring Manarola was popular with local couples. “Otherwise what kind of love lane would it be?” said Marinella Cigliano, a 60-something who remembers getting caught by her mother while making out with a long-ago boyfriend.

As young mothers, “we brought our children in strollers, a place for afternoon walks,” said Roberta Pecunia, whose grandfather Brizio was among the local villagers who in the 1930s carved the path out of the rock face to link the towns. And when Vittoria Capellini’s father was a young boy, walking the trail to school, his mother would tell him to “run like crazy” over the sections of the trail where the cliff face was particularly unstable.

Eventually, a rockslide did occur, in 2012, closing the trail to the dismay of trekkers from around the world and the frustration of locals, now cut off from convenient access to services, schools and shops, not to mention relatives and friends. The only alternatives were oft-crowded trains, ferries or a sweat-inducing path up in the hills. “For us, it was a tragedy,” said Ms. Cigliano, who runs a luggage ******** near the Riomaggiore train station.

The trail reopened to tourists this month after a 24 million euro makeover — about $26 million — designed to secure the cliffs from repeat accidents, even as local officials have been pondering the effect that the reopening will have on an area whose popularity has risen stratospherically in recent years.

“The kind of tourism that leads people to seeing the Cinque Terre as a sort of Disneyland,” said Massimo Giacchetta, the regional president of a small-business association.

When the Via dell’Amore closed 12 years ago, the area had been attracting some 870,000 visitors a year. In 2023, some four million people passed through. The local population numbers around 4,000. You do the math.

The tourist ***** has already upended life for many residents, crowding them out of public spaces, raising housing and food prices, and subbing out stores that catered to basic needs, like butchers or fishmongers, with restaurants and fried fish shops.

“They eat, and eat, and eat,” said Paola Villa, a retired Riomaggiore homeowner.

One local who commutes every day said trains were practically never on schedule because of the time it took to allow tourists to get off and on at each of the five villages, where guards keep mindful watch over crowded — often perilously so — platforms.

Even the trails linking some of the other Cinque Terre villages have been snarled by pedestrian traffic jams, forcing local officials to enforce one-ways on the most congested days “to ensure that accidents don’t happen,” said Alessandro Bacchioni of the Club Alpino *********, a national hiker’s association often called on by local authorities to assist with people management.

Compared with other popular area that struggle with overtourism, like Amsterdam, Barcelona or Iceland, the minute size of the Cinque Terre villages means that the effect is felt more strongly.

In Italy, tourist towns charge an overnight tax for visitors to help offset the costs of the daily wear and tear. But in Cinque Terre, only a fraction of the visitors actually sleep in one of the villages, so the €2 per night tax is a drop in the bucket, said Fabrizia Pecunia, the mayor of both Riomaggiore and Manarola.

This year, Venice became the first city to experiment with an entrance fee for day-trippers, the results of which are still unclear. Ms. Pecunia said she had asked the national government to greenlight a similar entrance fee “many times,” to no avail.

So, somewhat counter intuitively, local officials are hoping that the reopening of the Via dell’Amore will be an opportunity to get people to take less beaten paths, especially those in the hills, far from the water.

“We want people to visit the park with their shoulders to the sea,” said Patrizio Scarpellini, the director of the

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. He pointed out that the Via dell’Amore made up only about 1,000 yards of 75 miles worth of trails in the park, which is a

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.

“The Via dell’Amore is the symbol of the Cinque Terre throughout the world,” but the area’s culture and history offered much more to explore, the mayor said.

Donatella Bianchi, the president of the park, said she hoped the focus on the Via dell’Amore would draw out “what got a little bit lost,” recovering the narrative of perseverance and backbreaking labor of generations to mold nature to human needs. (Nature does not always comply, as a succession of

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, downpours, mudslides and rockslides like

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can attest.)

In Riomaggiore, one can still come across people who farmed high in the hills, growing grapes and primary crops, on the terraced lots that define the area’s landscape and contribute to its unique beauty.

“My uncle could carry three, while my cousin and I would carry one,” said Carlo Passeri, a retired traffic police officer, recalling the harvests of his youth, heaving grapes down the hills in broad baskets.

“Because there was ********,” he said, “all the fields were cultivated — it was so beautiful.” Now, he added, “no one wants to work the fields.”

Instead, “people rent out rooms, even the budelli,” a local term for cellars, said Mr. Passeri, who was born in Riomaggiore. “So everyone’s happy because they’re all making money.”

The mayor estimated that today, some 90 percent of the population lived off tourist-related activities, including short-term rentals.

The shift from traditional agriculture in the hills to tourism in town has meant that most of the farms terraced with the typical dry-stone walls have been abandoned.

Mr. Scarpellini said that at the beginning of the 20th century, there were around 2,000 terraced plots, now there are just over 100. “We have to get people back to places where there is culture, identity and wealth, and preserve this landscape, which is a world heritage site,” he said.

Neglect of the terracing led to other disasters in the past, including landslides in 2011 that badly damaged some of the villages. Efforts to revive the terracing tradition have been limited.

During the high season, access to the Via dell’Amore will be regulated, require a reservation and be limited to 400 people an hour, at a cost €10, or nearly the same in dollars.

Part of the money from the tickets to the path will pay for maintenance, which will be constant, said Ms. Capellini, the deputy mayor of Riomaggiore, pointing to a restored part of the trail that her father once had to run through as she strolled among newly planted shrubs, benches where lovers can canoodle (allowed) and fading graffiti pledging eternal love scrawled into the cliff walls (not allowed).

“People can come here to take a selfie — we all do it,” Ms. Capellini said. But she hoped the reopening of the Via dell’Amore would entice visitors to learn about the culture and history of Cinque Terre. “It’s our story,” she said.

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#Rethinking #Tourism #Renewal #Beloved #Italian #Path

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