[Barnes]

Cinque Terre is off the beaten path once the day trippers and cruise passengers leave for the day.

I stayed in Vernaza for 3 nights and on our first evening while drinking beers with my wife in the square listening to some guitar player, around aperitivo time an old man came down and was dancing with everyone he could grab.

Two nights later my wife, brother and sister in law, were going out with a local fisherman to see how they catch all the delicious seafood I was going through in town. We spent some time at the dock waiting for someone before getting underway. Turned out it was the old guy from the piazza. The captain gave him some fish from earlier in the day and we asked who he was.

He was born in Vernaza and was captured by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp where he escaped and basically walked from Germany back to Vernaza and has been there ever since.

It was too rough to pull in the nets so the captain showed some of the artifacts he had dragged up over the years. Etruscan, Roman, Syrian pottery and artifacts. We ate anchovies and local cheese, drank wine and watched the sun set over the Med while the captain told us his father's stories of the war and all about what the it was like living and growing up in Vernaza.

If that is the beaten path, $#%& the unbeaten path.

We were in Italy a little under a year ago for a wedding.

We did:

Rome: Meh. I studied a lot of history and specifically art history. It felt like I had already been there. We did a night tour of the Roman ruins and Colosseum which is THE WAY to see anything. We were two of only about 50 people in the Colosseum at around midnight.

Viareggio: We went off the beaten path and regretted it. This is the Italian Myrtle Beach without the mini putt and go carts. My Italian is flimsy and it was clear we were outsiders and treated as such by locals who were obviously tired at the end of the summer holiday season. Almost got into a fistfight on the street here.

Lucca: Mentioned by Furnaceface and I agree. I could have sat and watched the end of days sitting in the Piazza dell'Anfiteatro and been fine with it. The Piazza is elliptical as it is built over the old Roman Amphitheater.

Vernaza (Cinque Terre): Awesome, see above. Stay in one of the towns for sure if you can. We only saw two of them as many of the trails are still closed from the floods and there was a train strike the day we had set aside to see them. You can buy a Cinque Terre day pass that allows you to hike or take the train for the day. It's a National Park so you need to pay to hike but you walk through terraced vineyards and olive groves. The terrace walls are hand placed without mortar and the say there are more stones in the terraces of Cinque Terre then in the Great Wall of China. The home made monorail trains the local vineyards have to get up and down the valleys are fascinating.

Pisa: Get off train, check your luggage at the station, take picture of tower, go back to station, get your bags and move on.

Florence: Best city in the world.

Tuscany: Stayed at a villa for the wedding. Did Tuscan things. Villa was built by the uncle of Niccolo Machiavelli and was were he wrote The Prince. Facade was designed by Michelangelo.
I liked doing Tuscan things. They've got it figured out.