S/V Aphrodite

Corsica

We departed Barcelona on 9/16/07 and sailed across the notorious Gulf of Leon to Corsica, which is a group of French islands about 100 miles off the French coast, tucked in closer to Italy than it is to France. The high jagged mountains are an impressive sight. Dorothy Carrington, author of Granite Island, describes her first view like this: ‘”The mountains surged into the sky, behind, beyond, above one another, ending in rows of cones and spikes and square-topped knobs like gigantic teeth. Their slopes, smothered in vegetation, looked uninhabited and impenetrable.’ The proximity of the mountains to the coast is impressive and daunting because in many places the mountains are the coast, dropping straight down, deep into the sea offering no safe anchorages”.  We only stayed a few days because the weather was favorable for continuing on to Italy, our primary destination.

Portofino Italy, the Italian Riviera

Aphrodite arrived in Italy 9/20/07, making landfall on the POSH town of Portofino, where all of the buildings are perfectly painted in varied hues of pastels, salmon, saffron, pink and cream, window trim painted with such precision and depth that I had to touch it to realize that it was just relief, not actually trimmed in wood. And the water, it is still just as clear and blue as I remember it being 25 years ago. We immediately went into town and started our love affair with Italian food. Our diet consists primarily of pasta, pizza by the slice, foccasia bread and gellato now.  This is the most expensive region of Italy to live in.

Cinque Terre

(Kacy and Chris, we found your next hiking ground! All you have to do is get yourselves to Italy!)  The area of Cinque Terre, translation: 5 lands, offers some of Italy’s most picturesque and dramatic coastline, second only to the Amalfi Coast south of Rome and Naples.The pastel colored homes and buildings continue as we make our way south, a bit less tidy here than in the high rent district of Portofino, but charming and quaint just the same. Historically these were 5 tiny remote villages which were connected and accessible only by boat or on foot via a steep, narrow, cliff hugging trail. The villages are built high on enormous rock cliffs, looking like they are going to topple right into the sea. The views are breathtaking, cliffs plunging straight into the sea. I think Cinque Terre must have been written up in the American travel guides as “this year’s place to travel to”, especially for the 20-30 something age group because most of the people here are American. We have not heard this much American English spoken since leaving FL.The nights are getting cooler and the sun is setting earlier, it must be autumn. Burrr… It is time for me to pack away my summer clothes and pull out my long sleeved shirts and pants. We will continue our way southward to Naples with a stop at one of the Tuscan Islands just off the mainland. We will be in Italy until the beginning of December when we will make our way to Tunisia, Africa.