When it comes to the Italian Riviera, people seem to patter on and on about Cinque Terre, but just down the coast is another (equally as charming) stretch of shoreline, with a literary history to boot. The so-called Gulf of Poets (Golfo dei Poeti), formally the Gulf of La Spezia, offers the same colorful towns and clear waters of its much-talked-about sibling, but with a fraction of the crowds and costs. 

It was 1919 when playwright Sem Benelli referred to this gulf, for the very first time, as the Gulf of Poets during his stay in San Terenzo while writing the opera La Cena delle Beffe: “Beato te, o Poeta della scienza che riposi in pace nel Golfo dei Poeti. Beati voi, abitatori di questo Golfo, che avete trovato un uomo che accoglierà degnamente le ombre dei grandi visitatori.”