Going through Italy's fishing villages

Timira Gupta chances upon Cinque Terra, a group of villages that satisfy her fish-loving Bengali blood

When you take a holiday for two months in a foreign land with absolutely no itinerary in mind, you realise that you stop being a 'tourist'. You're not interested in city hopping, absolutely loathe tourists although you're one yourself and you'd rather laze by the lakeside, watching happy families unpack their camping kits, than go site-seeing.

On one such afternoon by the lake, a happy camping Italian family invited me over to their tent for a freshly cooked lunch of fish and pasta. I am Bengali and when fish is on my plate, I can't talk of anything else. So after a brief peppering with the whats, wheres and hows of Italian fish, the family finally gave up the secret of the "five fishing villages along the Italian Mediterranean". That was all I needed. This fishing paradiso was calling out to me. A quick sales pitch to two friends, which included the lure of delectable fish in all forms, and we were on a train ride to Cinque Terre.

There, where?
In the region of Liguria, north-west of Italy, lies Cinque Terre (pronounced: cheenk-kweh tehr-reh) one of creation's finest gifts to man, which he has graciously accepted by making it magically accessible to himself and his fellow kind. Endless kilometres of rocky cliffs make a coast line that precipitously drops into the unruly gush of the Mediterranean Sea. Milky white waters froth against the jagged rocks as they lash with unswerving vigour. The villages with their brightly coloured houses almost tip over the cliff, as if nudging and struggling to get a better view of the expansive sea. That was Cinque Terre to me full of adjectives and adverbs trying hard to do justice to the overwhelming experience around. Clearly we had a lot more on our plate than to just eat fish!

Amazing pace
Like every wandering journeyman we bought a map, it threw up two routes that took you through the five villages spread along the coast. The first by ferry or train, for which you didn't really need the map, the second by foot. With the tools provided by a cartographer in hand, we tried our hand at some Newtonian physics, decoding the distance so as to get the approximate time we'd take to get from the first village, Riomaggiore, to the last village of Monterosso. By the time we had gotten our head around 'time', 'speed' and 'distance' and their incestuous relationship we had trekked for over five hours but had barely covered three kilometres. Looking around us we were struck by an unsettling realisation. This Mediterranean paradise was a voyeur's fantasy.

Eye of a voyeur
Five villages, each with its unique flavour, and we had just one day to soak it all in. While most tourists took this nine-kilometer trek as a challenge to gloat in self-glory, we chose to traipse along and into the tiny bylanes of the villages. Idle fishing boats lined the streets narrating a story that once was. Crumbling houses were refurbished in bright colours serving as 'rooms-to-let'. Home-turned-restaurants bustled with gourmands demanding more than it could cook up. Cinque Terre's nuances forced you to go back a couple of decades and picture what these villages might have been then: Grand, primeval and unreal; straight out of an Italian folktale; a simple life of fishing and eating what you fish. A "once-upon-a-time" story that may not particularly have a "happily-ever-after" ending today.

Tourism had overrun the place, making it completely dependent on visitors. The desperation for making two ends meet could be sensed in the exaggerated prices of everything that was on sale. Be it silly souvenirs, local cuisine or even one's own privacy that was put out to be photographed every minute. An entry fee of five Euros gave you the license to walk through this 'UNESCO World Heritage Site', to be able to peep into the lives of the people living there, and to play voyeur.

Five Euros seemed like a small price to pay for such voyeuristic pursuits, and all notions of peek-a-boo photography suddenly seemed shallow. So, in went the camera back in its case. With such disarming quaintness around it was going to be an exercise in restraint.

We walked through the narrow lanes, trying not to peep too blatantly into the closely constructed stone houses. Gaps between curtained windows revealed the magic of mundane everyday activities; old women sat outside their homes chatting away while little girls running after each other disappeared into mysterious bylanes. Their lives were out on display and they were oblivious to the scores of tourists who passed them by each day. They didn't seem to mind, so I wondered, why did I? With some shameless rational getting the better of my restraint, out sprang the camera and there it stayed for the rest of the trek along the blissful coast.

Cooling off
Overwhelmed by nature's magnificence around us, we hadn't realised that it had been over six hours since we had started our trek. This realisation brought with it fatigue and all we wanted to do was take a dip in the Mediterranean waters and placate our ravenous appetite for all things marine with an authentic Ligurian meal.

The last village of Monterosso with its white sand and alluring blue water was ideal for the douse. The sea was beautiful not too salty, not too rough, very welcoming and most comforting. With our seaside frolicking done we turned to the menu cards, trying to decide whether to go for the Special Fish-of-the-Day, Sailor's Mussels (an authentic dish of the region), or the famous Ligurian rabbit (a local specialty).

The owner-cum-chef a typical Italian lady who was managing three crazy children, one lazy husband and a restaurant full of guests u2013 suggested we try one of each and we had not the heart to decline. The meal was a perfect round-up to the magical day. It complemented the flavour of its region u2013 modest and simple yet completely elating.