Riomaggiore
Stacked pastel houses tumble down a narrow ravine to a small fishing harbor on Italy's Ligurian coast.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Riomaggiore in Cinque Terre follows the painter Telemaco Signorini, who stumbled on the village in 1860 while chasing landscapes near the Gulf of Poets, and kept returning to sketch it for years. It traces how his paintings first showed the outside world that Cinque Terre existed, and how the village's tower houses were built with two doors apiece, one to the harbor and one uphill, as a defense against Saracen raiders. You'll also hear about the quadrangular castle built by the lords of Ripalta and finished under Genoa two centuries later.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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