Levanto – May 31,2023
Jun 13th, 2023 by rallyadmin
We leave the yurt about 8:30 and knock on the main house door to say good bye to our host. She doesn’t answer and just are we walking away the door opens and she greets us a bit disheveled. Her daughter is ill and home in bed so everyone has slept in.
We says our thanks and good byes and head down the trail to the car for the last time. It’s another beautiful day and the car is sitting there on the side of the steep, narrow road waiting for the drive to Levantro.
ro on the lovely twisty, northern Italian autostrada. The road is fast with not much traffic. We have to be in Levantro by 12:30 to check in to the small boutique hotel. The rental agency closes for siesta at 12:30 and doesn’t reopen until 3PM. Luckily we make it just in time.
We get the keys and credit card the fee. The girl who is checking us injust gives us the address and a cursory point “it’s over there.” We’ve parked on the main drag through town and we’re depending on Google Maps to actually give us directions to the apartment, sometimes an interesting prospect.
We get to within rock throwing distance of the address and then get blocked by a very narrow, one-way entrance to the street that the apartment (with secure parking) is located on. I finally ask for directions and the most convoluted oath around a small neighborhood but we finally get to the address, open the secure garage, park the car, get our bags and hed net door to the apartment.
The compartment is up a few flights of stairs and has what is now common, keypad entrance. Into the main area of the apartment and find our room, Drop the bags. Turn on the air cond and head out for some lunch.
The apartment is next to a large grocery store and just a block away from a pedestrian mall. Levantro is a pretty quite beach town so there’s not a large selection of restaurants but we pick one for a quick lunch and then off to search for boat tickets again to visit Cinque Terre tomorrow.
We walk along the raised promenade overlooking the beach but never do find the ticket kiosk for the boat. That really doesn’t matter. We are undecided about actually taking the boat to Cinque Terre. The boat leaves early and doesn’t return until late in the afternoon. If you go on the boat, it’s an all day adventure.
The alternative is to take the train from Levantro to each of the 5 villages that make up Cinque Terre. The advantage to the train is that you can get on and off any train that is running on the Cinque Terre route. The clouds have moved in and we decide that the train is the better option and head back to the apartment to unpack and rest until dinner.
We check “restaurants near us” on Google and find what looks like a pretty good pizza restaurant just a couple of blocks from the apartment. It turns out that the La Picea is a unique pizzeria. It has been winning “world championships” in the Italian pizza world for years and you order one of the “world championship” pizzas right off the menu.
That’s assuming that you can get in without reservations. Luckily, we arrived just before the rush and got one of the few tables on the street in from of the pizzeria. We order and wait for a bit with a nice glass of red wine (what else?) and surprisingly the pizzas arrive not long after we order.
These are traditional wood fired pizzas that only take a few minutes to cook but they still arrive faster than we expect. And, in all fairness, the pizzas are fabulous. I had no idea that there was such a thing as a “pizza world championship” (of course, I don’t know why not – there’s a world championship for everything else!) but these pizzas rank right up there.
We finish dinner and had back to the apartment. It’s been a long but fun day. Tomorrow, the train to Cinque Terre.
Obi-wan