Megan and I visit the Cinque Terre!!

My best friend Megan came to see me this week! She flew in from St. Louis to tour around Rome with me, and head out on a weekend trip. To plan our trip we didn't look in Italy-in-6-hours tour books or Europe-in-3-days books. We scoured a book my cousin Danny gave me for Christmas: Rick Steve's Europe Through the Back Door. Now, Danny must know me pretty well to give me this book, or else he just has really good taste :) But its not too surprising to find out that my dream destinations this semester are not the usual ones. I am afraid that I am not going to make it to Paris or Madrid, Munich or Stockholm. As beautiful as I'm sure those places are, they are going to have to wait for another trip. As far as this semester, I'm sticking to Italy, with Spring Break in Tunisia and a possible weekend trip to Budapest. Anyways, Europe Through the Back Door doesn't cover any of the usual places that tour books cover. It only shares about "back-door" places that really expose the true culture of an area. In Italy, the focus is on the Dolomites and on the Cinque Terre.
The Cinque Terre is a collection of five little towns in Liguria. We decided to stay in the smallest town, Corniglia, which also happens to be the only one not on the water. It is on top of a mountain right next to the water. This area is unbelievabely beautiful. A trail winds between all five towns, or a train totters by once an hour.

A remarkable thing about Liguria in general, and the Cinque Terre in particular is it's pesto. Yes, I said pesto. This is the birthplace of pesto in all its loveliness. And let me tell you- it- is- lovely. We have been eating pesto on crackers since we returned, which has only been a few days, but its awesome pesto.

Anyways, I thought it might be a good choice to chronicle the trip by what we ate, since this food is the best I've had in all of Italy. When we arrived, we walked around Corniglia and asked around for rooms to stay in. We saw a few, all were between 55 and 60 euro per night, and we decided on a room with a beautiful view for 60. When we got settled in, we walked through town and bought panini to eat on a bench. These panini were good, but not the focal event of the day by any means. The room that we got rested above a restaurant, probably with the best view in town for lunch. We were told that dinner began at 7:00 and we kept it in the back of our minds. When 7:00 rolled around, we weren't very interested in going very far since it is very dark far away from a city (go figure) so we strolled into our ground level. The prices were about the same as in Rome, except that a plate of penne pomodoro (penne with tomato sauce) in Rome costs about what penne alla polpa di granchio (penne with lump crabmeat) costs in Corniglia. Alot of the seafood requires an order of at least two, to get proportions right I assume. Megan and I ordered the seafood risotto, which came to our table in a crockpot. This was probably the best dish I have had in Italy so far. Risotto with clams, shrimp, mussels, prawns... it was heaven.
The next day we had pesto gnocchi and swordfish alla liguria for lunch in Vernazza. As I already mentioned that this is the hometown of pesto, the loveliness of this dish can be assumed to its fullest extent. The swordfish was delicious. It was a steak grilled to perfection with tomatoes, olives, capers, and olive oil on it. Sooooo good.

For dinner, we traveled to Manarola. We ate at a beautiful little restaurant there. Manarola had beautiful restaurants, at least from how little we saw. We got swordfish carpaccio for our appetizer. We really only went to this particular restaurant for this dish. Working at Francesca's Famiglia back in Barrington, our carpaccio con avocado is my favorite dish, and this was the first time I have ever encountered it in Italy. This swordfish carpaccio was delicious, the flavor of the fish was so distinctive and delicate. For our pasta, Megan got another gnocci pomodoro this time and I got pesto ravioli.
Those are the most memorable meals that we had for me. Delicious. Yum.