Surprise weekend in Porto Venere

We have a yearly tradition of organizing a surprise weekend for each other's birthdays. Mathilde's birthday was actually last weekend, but due to my unplanned trip to Finland, we had to postpone celebrations to this weekend.

This time around, I decided to take Mathlide to Italy (well, for these surprise weekends, Italy is actually almost more of a rule than exception...!), to Portovenere. Portovenere is one of those ridiculously picteresque villages that dot the Ligurian coast - located just after Cinque Terre.

We arrived at the hotel, located in the nearby hamlet of Le Grazie. The location of the hotel is pretty much perfect, located by the seaside, with a nice view over the bay. Unfortunately, we had no bayside view, though...We arrived pretty late at the hotel, so didn't have time to start exploring Porto Venere until next morning.

Getting into Porto Venere with a car is quite tricky, as it is, after all, just a small fishing village, not dimensioned to welcome the hordes of tourists that assail the place during the summer months. So we ended up parking quite a distance away from the village. But no complaints about that, the coastside walk into the village was pretty impressive (offering views over the Porto Venere peninsula and impressive Isola Palmaria just facing the village).

Porto Venere is, as mentioned, actually a pretty tiny place. Basically there is just one main street going through the village where the main commerces/services/restaurants and so forth are located. What's most impressive about Porto Venere is surely the site, the village is spectacularly built at the rocky tip of a peninsula. And, this being an Italian village, all the houses are beautifully pastel coloured as well, making it a very fotogenic place.

Anyway, we started our exploration of the place by walking up the slopes of the village up to the hilltop overlooking the village, which is where the Doria castle is located. There's also a pretty gothic church up there. But most importantly, the views from up there are just amazing... And to make things better, we were treated to a blue sky!

From there we made our way back down to the village, where we decided to visit Byron's Bay, a nice little secluded bay with a lovely little beach (although admittedly once swimming, the water didn't seem quite as chrystal clear as it did from the mainland). The place got its name from Lord Byron, the English poet who drew much inspiration from this beautiful place, apparently. (no wonder!)

We ended our visit of the village by checking out the beautiful Romanesque church of Saint-Lawrence, which is located at the very tip of the village. Not only is the church sublime, the views from there towards the village and Isola Palmaria are also stunning).

After a quick mobile lunch, we decided to jump on the shuttle boat over to Isola Palmaria, located just a couple of hundred meters from Porto Venere. It's a pretty interesting place to wonder around. Most of the island is undeveloped, so it's a great place for hiking - so we decided to do just that. We decided to go for what seemed like a pretty easy 1-2 hours hike (judging from the distance), but actually it turned out to be a bit tougher than that, as the hiking trail has some pretty steep slopes up and down.

A very nice way to spend a summer afternoon - thankfully it wasn't too hot! The island has been used for military purposes, there are still quite a few military installations there, some no longer in use.

Anyway, the plan was to actually have dinner at a place called the Locanda on the island. My surprise romantic dinner for Mathilde! Unfortunately, it all back-fired a bit... The Locanda may have been a pretty classy place in its heyday, but the glory days are unfortunately a thing of the past. The service was bad, the food unspectacular, and we didn't even have a great view. So, not the best possible way to end an otherwise fantastic day! Oh well, must do my research better next time...

Since we'd actually seen Porto Venere already on the Saturday, we decided not to head back there on Sunday (especially after our traumatic experience trying to park...). There is actually a Roman villa located in La Grazie, where our hotel was located, so we decided to try to locate and visit that. We were able to locate it, but it was closed, unfortunately. Instead of that, we were treated to a sea rescue dog exhibition in the port of La Grazie.

After that, we decided to head over to Lerici for lunch. Lerici is another beautiful Ligurian village, similar to the villages of Cinque Terre and Porto Venere. Parking turned out to be difficult again, we actually ended up parking illegally and walking down to the village. Lerici is indeed a very pretty place, even if the site is a bit less dramatic than Porto Venere's. We found a very nice little restaurant under some shady arcades in the historic part of the village, where we had an excellent lunch...

After a short walk in the port, where we checked out a second-hand book market, it was sadly time to make our way back to France. We did stop on the way home for a swim on the Italian Riviera.

So, another great weekend in Italy, then ;) !