About an hour down the slide from our home is a group of midget villages built on seaside cliffs . The name of this expanse is the Cinque Terre because there are five main villages along the coast .
The first photo here is of the tumid of the small town , Riomaggiore , on the southerly terminal of the Cinque Terre . Up until a few decades ago , there were no roads to the Cinque Terre , and the only way to get there was either by boat , on the power train , or using the understructure way that wind up and over the coastal mint .
The steep cliffs in this expanse have all been ramp up up into bench that house grape vine vines . The bulk of this extraordinary rockwork was put in place after the fall of the Roman Catholic empire , when the locals involve to detect a way to protect themselves from plagiarist .
The most notable landmark in our town of Rapallo is the little castle on the seafront that was built in the 1500s to domiciliate some fully grown Modern carom that were intended to help with the defensive structure against the pirate Dragut , whose ships had been landing ofttimes in the area and slip horses and women from the local .
The cannons never were used though , because Dragut died the year that the munition was completed , and the Genoese dark blue finally put an end to most of the piracy .
All over Italy , masses have built their villages and terraces on the side of cliffs , presumably because pirates were usually too otiose to climb up the cliffs . Because my own garden is also built on steep drop , I feel a certain comradeship with Cinque Terre and often jest with my neighbors that we can all take refuge in the vegetable garden if the pirates ever attack Rapallo again .
One of the telling features of the Cinque Terre vinery these day is the electronic internet of simple monorails that climb up up and down the cliffs . The 2nd photograph today is of one of the monorail engine . One can see how the single track of the monorail goes flat up the cliff in the backdrop . The engines for these monorails are just short rototiller type engine , but they finagle to pull the carts up the extremely steep gradient .
My married woman and I went for a drive on one of these monorails a few years ago when I wrote an article about the Cinque Terre for an American wine magazine . The drive was both elating and terrifying . These years the harvest home and most oeuvre project are accomplished with the help of the monorails . I ’m very envious and would know to figure out a way to put a small monorail system of rules on my own drop-off .
In the old days viticulture was a arduous process in the Cinque Terre . Just haul the baskets of harvested grape vine up or down the drop to reach a appeal point was incredibly difficult . The drop-off are really outrageous and in some places they actually border right on the piss .
Old stories spoke of farmers hanging themselves over the cliffs on ropes in ordination to reap the grapes . This may or may not have been true , but it is well known that loaded baskets full of newly glean grapes were sometimes frown into waiting boats because that was easier than carry the grapes along the cliffside paths . Heroic agriculture indeed !
