Villa Montale Apartment I Limoni

This guide to Villa Montale's Apartment I Limoni above Monterosso in Cinque Terre follows the terraced lemon groves that shaped Eugenio Montale's poetry and the anonymous generations of Ligurian farmers who built the dry stone walls beneath the house without mortar or signature. It traces the villa his family raised on this slope in eighteen eighty, nicknamed the yellowish pagoda, and the boyhood summers that turned Montale away from the grand poetic style of his contemporaries toward the ordinary sights of ditches, cane and fruit. Stand at the window and look down at the same hand-built terraces that still hold the hillside together today.