Italy's Greatest Hit

Supporting Grasso's theory, we heard no Italian. In fact, the only locals we encountered were one old paesano selling apples, wine and water from a basket on the side of the trail, and the ubiquitous wild cats that live off the scraps and cat food donations of feline-loving visitors.

Castle in the Sun

Coming upon Vernazza in sunlight is dreamlike.

The most picturesque of the Cinque Terre villages, it sits on a rock promontory, topped by the tower that remains from an 11th-century castle. There is a small, semicircular fishing port protected by a curving breakwater and watched over by a church with sea views.

We took a table in the small square by the port and refueled with espresso and water. Seawater lapped at the edge of the piazza where fishing boats rested. More of those Cinque Terre cats sunned themselves on the decks.

If it had been just my wife and me on the trip, without a child requiring the comforts of satellite TV and a beach on which to build sand castles, we could have wasted days here.

Continuing from Vernazza, we climbed back onto the cliffs for another 1 1/2-hour stretch of trail that is the wildest of the coast. For much of this section, the trail skirts cliffs and vine terraces that have long been taken over by maquis. We found a rocky ledge and ate a lunch of bread, salami and sheep cheese. The only sound was the white surf crashing along the cliffs far below. We layered down to our T-shirts, sat in the sun and didn't want to move.

After lunch, we walked through the shade of overgrown olive groves to our next stop, the village of Corniglia, perched high on a forested cliff. There we rested and recharged with more espresso at an outdoor cafe before being pushed out of our seats by a brief afternoon sun shower.

The last legs of the trail were the shortest and the least impressive. Leaving Corniglia, the trail offers views of the train station, rail yards and some abandoned cabanas from another era. Then it becomes a four-foot-wide flat path leading to Manarola, built on a small curving rock peninsula that creates a natural port.

Finally, all that remained was a 20-minute stroll down the stone-paved Via dell'Amore (Lovers Lane), which was destroyed by a landslide in the 1990s and reopened several years later with an unfortunate concrete protective tunnel that has since been covered with graffiti.

Arriving in Riomaggiore, built alongside a natural ravine that leads down to a tiny fishing port, we soaked up the late afternoon sun and celebrated -- my wife and I with our first glasses of dry white Cinque Terre wine.

Warning Signs

The Cinque Terre's local-based tourist industry still communicates with a lot of hand-lettered signs, the most popular of which announce the same message in three languages: "Camere, Zimmer, Rooms."

But I noticed other signs that weren't as inviting: the "No" signs. "Do not touch" was pinned to clothes hung outside a boutique; "No backpacks in store" was fixed to some shop doors. When we stopped to buy the fixings for our lunch at a small grocery in Vernazza, another customer was scrutinizing the apples out front when the owner cried out in English, "You touch -- you buy."

In Manarola, when we stopped for ice cream at a gelateria, a piece of paper taped to the front of the freezer case warned: "NOT FREE SAMPLES."

I was dumbfounded: No touching? No tasting? In Italy?