San Bernardino

This guide to San Bernardino, a ridge-top hamlet in Cinque Terre, opens a thousand years ago with families from the Val di Vara driven out of their inland valleys by disease and overcrowding, forced onto slopes too steep to plow. It follows the mortarless dry stone walls they built by hand to terrace those slopes, and the staggering scale those walls reach across just fourteen kilometers of coastline. You will hear about the small nineteenth century church reworked from a medieval chapel, the view toward Corniglia, Manarola and Guvano bay from the bench by the fig tree, and the handful of families, nearly all named Basso, who still live here today.