Rethinking tourism with the renewal of a beloved Italian path

RIOMAGGIORE, Italy – In Riomaggiore, one of the five vertigo-inducing villages that make up Cinque Terre, which hugs the steep cliffs of Italy’s north-western coast, just about everyone has a memory of the Via dell’Amore, or Love’s Lane.

With breathtaking sunset views, the seacoast trail to neighbouring Manarola was popular with local couples. “Otherwise, what kind of love lane would it be?” said Ms Marinella Cigliano, a 60something who remembers getting caught by her mother while making out with a long-ago boyfriend.

As young mothers, “we brought our children in strollers, a place for afternoon walks”, said Ms Roberta Pecunia. Her grandfather was among the local villagers who in the 1930s carved the path out of the rock face to link the towns.

And when Ms Vittoria Capellini’s father was a young boy, walking the trail to school, his mother would tell him to “run like crazy” over the sections of the trail where the cliff face was particularly unstable.

Eventually, a rockslide took place in 2012, closing the trail to the dismay of trekkers from around the world and the frustration of locals, now cut off from convenient access to services, schools and shops, as well as relatives and friends.

The only alternatives were oft-crowded trains, ferries or a sweat-inducing path up in the hills.

“For us, it was a tragedy,” said Ms Cigliano, who runs a luggage deposit near the Riomaggiore train station.

The trail reopened to tourists in August after a €24 million (S$35 million) makeover to secure the cliffs from repeat accidents, even as local officials have been pondering the effect the reopening will have on an area whose popularity has risen stratospherically in recent years.

“The kind of tourism that leads people to seeing the Cinque Terre as a sort of Disneyland,” said Mr Massimo Giacchetta, regional president of a small-business association.

When the Via dell’Amore closed 12 years ago, the area had been attracting some 870,000 visitors a year. In 2023, some four million people passed through.

The local population numbers around 4,000.

The tourist boom has upended life for many residents – crowding them out of public spaces, raising housing and food prices, and subbing out stores that catered to basic needs, such as butchers or fishmongers, with restaurants and fried fish shops.

“They eat, and eat, and eat,” said retired Riomaggiore home owner Paola Villa.

One local who commutes daily said trains were never on schedule because of the time it took to allow tourists to get off and on at each of the five villages, where guards keep mindful watch over crowded – often perilously so – platforms.

Even the trails linking some of the other Cinque Terre villages have been snarled by pedestrian traffic jams, forcing local officials to enforce one-ways on the most congested days.

Compared with other popular areas that struggle with overtourism, such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Spain or Iceland, the minute size of the Cinque Terre villages means that the effect is felt more strongly.

In Italy, tourist towns charge an overnight tax for visitors to help offset the costs of the daily wear and tear. But in Cinque Terre, only a fraction of the visitors sleep in one of the villages, so the €2 a night tax is a drop in the bucket, said Riomaggiore and Manarola mayor Fabrizia Pecunia.

In 2024, Venice became the first city to experiment with an entrance fee for day-trippers, the results of which are still unclear.

Ms Pecunia had asked the national government to greenlight a similar entrance fee many times, to no avail. So, local officials are hoping that the reopening of the Via dell’Amore will be an opportunity to get people to take less beaten paths, especially those in the hills, far from the water.

“We want people to visit the park with their shoulders to the sea,” said Cinque Terre National Park director Patrizio Scarpellini. He pointed out that the Via dell’Amore made up only about 900m of 121km worth of trails in the park, which is a Unesco World Heritage site.

During the high season, access to the Via dell’Amore will be regulated, require a reservation and be limited to 400 people an hour, at a cost of €10.

Part of the money from the tickets to the path will pay for maintenance, which will be constant, said Ms Capellini, deputy mayor of Riomaggiore, pointing to a restored part of the trail where her father once had to run through as she strolled among newly planted shrubs, benches where lovers can canoodle and fading graffiti pledging love scrawled into the cliff walls.

“People can come here to take a selfie – we all do it,” Ms Capellini said. But she hoped the reopening of the Via dell’Amore would entice visitors to learn about the culture and history of Cinque Terre. “It’s our story,” she added. NYTIMES