Porto Venere, Italy - Instagram Stories

We had the best day today. We left our Cinque Terre apartment at about 9:00 and pushed all of our luggage up the hill until we got to the parking lot where we waited for Chris to grab the car. It unexpectedly rained overnight so the running shoes that we so carefully cleaned and set out to dry got soaked overnight.  We bagged them up and carried them with us wet. 

When we reached La Spezia we made the spontaneous decision to head south and check out the village of Ponta Venere. We parked above the city and took a 2 euro shuttle down to the seaside Main Street. It was charming.  We wandered slowly past the streets by the harbor and then headed up to the church and castle ruins and discovered the most amazing place to swim.  We hadn’t worn our hiking clothes and so weren’t set up to swim but the boys couldn’t resist taking their shirts off and jumping in. What a gorgeous place. Wish we could have stayed and enjoyed it all day. 

After a good hour we wandered up to the base of the castle and through the upper streets which provided amazing views of the churches and water below. We ended on the busy but shaded upper Main Street. Just the day before I had mentioned how I’d love to have Costco samples set up so I could try all the different kinds of pastas. Mid road we found a homemade pesto place giving out samples on pieces of bread. We tried a piece and walked for five seconds until we stopped and said, ‘wait, that was good’. We decided to grab some take away pasta cups with cold pasta salad covered in pesto. Delicious and fun to try something entirely new. We jumped back in the shuttle and headed back to the car. One hour drive to Lucca.