The Curse of Cinque Terre

I’ve often heard the expression that looks can be deceiving, sometimes even deadly. Whoever coined that expression had clearly traveled to the Cinque Terre region in Italy.

I’d been living in London for three months attending grad school and I was gearing up for my second quarter in London. Emily (my advertising partner and dear friend) and I had planned a three-week holiday, including a one-week adventure in Ireland and a glorious two-week train jaunt around Italy. Because we were students living in the two-to-one pound-to-dollar kingdom known as London, we were broke. Extremely broke. We knew that to travel within our budget we’d have to cut corners, but that didn’t matter to us. We knew that budget or not, our trip would be an experience we’d talk about for the rest of our lives.

Although we were excited about Ireland, we fixated on Italy. We talked incessantly about floating our advertising-weary bodies aimlessly on the sea, with either the mountainous glory of Positano or the jagged cliffs of Cinque Terre as our backdrop. Though we’d planned stops in Rome, Florence, Tuscany, and Venice, we knew that Cinque Terre and Positano would be our prime spots for some much needed relaxation.

We were especially excited about Cinque Terre because it had the added attraction of an incredible seven mile coastal hike between each of the five villages that make up the Cinque Terre. Armed with the recommendations of our trusty Rick Steves’ Italy guidebook, we decided to stay in a beach-side pensione in Vernazza.

I should preface the details of Cinque Terre by telling you that after we’d left our windows open on our first night in Florence, I was the lucky recipient of seventy-nine (yes, I counted) mosquito bites on just my face and neck—that doesn’t include the hundreds of bites that I couldn’t begin to count all over my body. Emily fared a little better, but we both arrived in Cinque Terre puffy-faced, itching, uncomfortable, and with a severe need for a good Chianti. We decided to splurge on a nice dinner. And that’s when the trouble started.