Manarola

This guide to Manarola in Cinque Terre follows Giancarlo Gariglio, a food and wine advocate, through the hand-built dry stone walls, or muretti, that have held these terraced hillsides since around the year one thousand. It traces just how punishing the labor is, far beyond what a flat vineyard demands, and the dockers who once carried grape baskets up nearly two hundred meters of stone steps by hand. Listen for the trenino, the small motorized monorail introduced in 1980 that still clatters through the vines on harvest mornings.