I’m up early in my favourite village on the Italian Riviera, as the morning sun touches the tip of Vernazza’s bell tower and greets a peaceful world. The air is damp, cool, and refreshing as I wander downhill, passing underneath the train tracks. I enjoy the fact that the town is essentially traffic-free, and realize that many of my favorite Italian towns — like Venice, Siena, Tuscany’s Volterra, and Lake Como’s Varenna — are all this way. Fiat-free Italy … just the way I like it.

Along a beautifully isolated six-mile stretch of the northern Italian coast lie the five small, dramatically set towns of the Cinque Terre. Each village is a variation on the same theme: a well-whittled, pastel jumble of homes — some perched on steep hillsides, some sloping into ravines — clinging to their hillsides like crusty sea creatures in a tide pool. Locals are the barnacles — hungry, but patient. And we travellers are like algae, coming in with the tide.