There is only one of these five villages where you can properly lie down beside the sea, so this morning I did the sensible thing and went there. Vernazza has its little harbour and its boats, but it does not really have a beach so much as a collection of rocks that have agreed, on certain afternoons, to become somewhere people sit. Monterosso is the one with sand. It is the last village on the line, the flattest, the least vertical, the one the guidebooks are faintly sniffy about because you can arrive without climbing anything at all. I took the little train four minutes along the coast, stepped almost directly onto the beach, and decided being sniffed at was a price I was perfectly willing to pay.
The train here is a small miracle that nobody seems to mention. It spends most of its life inside the mountain, so travelling between villages becomes a few minutes of darkness followed by a sudden, almost impolite explosion of blue. One moment you are underground, the next the Mediterranean is waiting outside the window, impossibly close. Four minutes to Monterosso. I have taken longer deciding what coffee to order.
Monterosso really has two beaches. There is the long sandy stretch at Fegina in the newer part of town, where neat rows of colourful umbrellas run the length of the promenade beneath the palms. Then there is the smaller pebble beach tucked beneath the old town, where umbrellas lean against pink and ochre buildings while the church tower watches quietly from above. I had intended to choose between them. Instead, I began the morning on the sand and ended the afternoon on the stones, and I recommend this sort of indecision to everyone.
I hired a sunbed and umbrella at one of the beach clubs along the waterfront, which is a very particular sort of transaction on this coast. You hand over twenty or thirty euros, receive a numbered lounger and a square of shade, and for the rest of the day that little rectangle of beach becomes the most complete address you own. Blue and white stripes seem to cover everything: umbrellas, loungers, towels. It is as though the whole coastline agreed on a uniform sometime around 1962 and has never found a reason to change it. I rather admire that.
I am not, by nature, someone who lies still for very long. My aunt Hélène used to say I was born already halfway out the door, and she was not being entirely complimentary when she said it. Yet there is something about this coast that quiets the part of me forever preparing to leave. I lay down. I read four pages of a book and truly understood two of them. I let the sun do what it always does, which is make every carefully arranged plan seem faintly unnecessary, and for once I did not argue. There is a particular surrender in a striped deck chair that I have never found in any spa or impossibly expensive hotel bed. Nobody is pampering you. You are simply, at last, out of excuses.
The water here does not look real. I realise I have used those words several times this week, but I keep meaning them. It slips over the pebbles so clear that the shadows of the boats rest on the seabed like second boats beneath them. It is cold in the honest Mediterranean way, shocking for exactly one heartbeat and forgiving every moment afterwards. I walked in slowly, pretending I might stop at my knees, then my waist, then my shoulders, and of course I went all the way. Standing there with the striped waterfront behind me, I understood immediately why people arrive here and quietly forget to leave.
I swam a little farther out, beyond the point where the noise of the beach dissolves into a gentle murmur, and floated on my back looking towards the hills. From the water you can see how improbably the town clings to the slope, terraces upon terraces, vines and lemons and faded houses balanced where they have no business balancing at all. My father would have been in this water before anyone else and out after everyone had gone, having somehow found the oldest fisherman with the smallest wooden boat and spent an hour talking about absolutely nothing. I spoke to no one. I simply floated and let him continue the conversation somewhere inside the part of me that still keeps him.
Back on the beach, the middle of the afternoon arrived the way it always seems to here, with a spritz. I did not so much order it as accept it. Cold, orange, faintly bitter, the ice already beginning to disappear into the heat. I drank it slowly at a little table with sand still clinging stubbornly to my feet. This is the hour when the entire coastline seems to agree to stop moving. Even the sea appears to exhale. Nobody is accomplishing anything, and neither are you, and there is something wonderfully democratic about a beach at two o’clock in the afternoon. Everyone equally horizontal. Everyone equally surrendered to the sun.
Later I bought a lemon granita from a little stand along the promenade, nothing more than crushed ice and real lemons, so cold it hurt in the nicest possible way. I sat beneath the palms and watched families drift home from the beach, pink, salt-stiff and content. The children never wanted to leave the water and had to be carried away protesting, and I understood them completely. I have been that child on this same coastline, a very long time ago, before the things I do not write about here. For a few quiet minutes, with the granita slowly melting in my hands, I was allowed to be her again.
There is an outdoor shower beside the beach clubs, nothing elaborate, just a cold ribbon of water falling through the afternoon heat. I stood beneath it, tipped my head back and laughed for no particular reason beyond the simple pleasure of being cold and warm at exactly the same time. Someone I will almost certainly never meet again laughed as well, because that sort of happiness is oddly contagious. I have visited many beautiful, carefully curated places this summer. I have worn the right dress, stood in the right light, smiled for the right photographs. None of them has felt quite as alive as thirty seconds beneath a cold beach shower with sand still between my toes.
By late afternoon I had drifted, exactly as promised, from the sand to the pebbles beneath the old town, where the umbrellas sit against the houses and the light becomes everything this coastline is famous for. I drew my knees up and watched the sea deepen from turquoise into something older and greener as the sun slipped behind the headland. The tower above turned gold. One by one the windows in the pastel houses began to glow. I stayed until almost everyone had gone, which is my favourite hour in any place, the quiet moment when the crowds leave and somewhere remembers itself again.
Eventually I pulled my sundress over sun-warmed skin and wandered back into the old town the way everyone leaves a perfect beach day: reluctant, a little sunburnt, and already nostalgic for an afternoon that technically has not quite finished. The lanes climb between weathered stone houses, and I followed them slowly, passing a bakery pulling down its shutters, a cat that quite clearly owned an entire staircase, and a woman watering geraniums three floors above who wished me good evening as though we had known each other for years.
I accomplished absolutely nothing today. That is the whole story. I lay beneath a striped umbrella beside a sea the colour of a beautiful lie. I swam. I drank something cold. I managed to burn the one place I always forget with sunscreen. I achieved nothing whatsoever, and it may have been the finest day of the week. There are four other villages waiting for me with footpaths and harbours and impossible views, and I promise I shall give them their turn. But there is something to be said for the only beach in Cinque Terre broad enough to ask nothing of you at all. Tomorrow I will earn my dinner on a cliff path. Today I simply floated, and let the sea keep the time.
More images from Cinque Terre
Full guide to all five villages, whenever you are planning your own: the complete guide to Cinque Terre. And if you missed how I arrived, it began in Vernazza.
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Read also: Somewhere Smaller | The Long Way Between the Villages | The Complete Guide to Cinque Terre
