We made ambitious plans. We planned a two-week trip to Italy with our friends. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Did I mention we have 3 toddlers between us? And that I was in my first trimester of pregnancy? Either way, I will assure you we had a wonderful trip.
We arrived in Italy via Milan, with few pictures to show of our time there as we spent these first days acclimatizing to our new location and trying to get the little ones through jet lag. We spent early mornings on the playground to get them into the sun and the afternoons trying to stay awake while briefly viewing some of Milan’s famous sites like the Duomo, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and BAM city park.
However, we didn’t stay long before we yearned for the Italian Riviera – particularly the water and the smoke-free blue skies from our wildfire plagued home in Canada. We took a train to Levanto, a beachfront town near Cinque Terre and settled in for the next five days. We booked a lovely apartment that opened out onto a garden with a terrace, where we enjoyed breakfasts in the warm summer sun and even cooked a few family dinners with pasta provided by the locals.
From our apartment we simply had to turn the corner through an arch and we were in the pedestrian-only old town. We window shopped, bought unnecessarily large volumes of focaccia, gobbled up deliciously juicy peaches from the market, and let the kids frolic at the town playground.
Within a few minutes we were on one of the only sandy beaches in the area – which our children loved. Cold beverages and gelato deliveries on the beach kept us there for many hours of the day! A short walk in either direction from the town took us to even more beaches, most of which were rocky or pebbled.
Though Levanto itself was a highlight, the main reason for basing ourselves here was for the opportunity to visit Cinque Terre. This coming up next!
