Italy is not particularly well known for its beaches. You wanna to to somewhere like Greece or Spain for that. But it has beaches.
Overall, I'm not a beach guy. I don't think anybody should be forced to look at my sweaty existence, and frankly I just don't see the point in lying around all day collecting cancer.
I love diving and snorkeling and such but you can't really make a whole vacation out of that unless you take proper courses and get serious, and then you're missing out on all the other stuff. However, being married, we dedicated some time to some beach stuff both in our brief stint in Barcelona and across these five famous fishing villages, collectively known as Cinque Terre.
The Italian Coast
Not far at all from Florence, this place is another massive tourist destination. This was my first experience with Italian trains and crikey they are good.
Cheap, fast, frequent, on time, clean, comfortable, and run into the early hours of the morning, starting up again only 3 or 4 hours later.
This marveling at an actual functional railway system should have lasted all vacation since I come from the UK where trains are: Expensive, slow, infrequent, always late, and dirty.
But our joy was thwarted by an obviously opportunistic ticket guy.
The Ticket Guy Scam
We were on our way back to our hotel from the beaches around 9pm. So was everybody else. A LOT of people were cramming into the train station. As a result, we had no phone signal.
I needed that signal to buy the actual tickets. We hadn't decided when we were going to go home until we were at the station but given we had done this several times, we thought it was fine. It was all in the spirit of our so far spontaneous, no-plan trip.
Coming from England, I thought 'no problem! we can get signal on the train, and worst case, just buy the ticket from the ticket guy when we're inside'. This is something I frequently did on the way to college back in the day in England so to me, that seemed totally normal.
It turns out that's now how it worked here. Not only did we never get any signal due to too many people in one place, but the ticket guy came and fined us
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY EUROS.
This was extortion! The original ticket was 5 euros! It was a 12 minute journey!
The thing is, I didn't even know we were being fined. Due to his rush to get off the train before it departed, he blabbered in Italian or very strong Italian accent, the only word of which I understood was 'fine' as in 'fine, no problem, I will sell you a ticket'.
Turns out he was very rapidly slapping a monetary fine on us before vanishing. It all happened in a flash!
Now, he was a legitimate officer. I read about this stuff online and this does happen to a bunch of innocent people who don't understand how this all works. But this guy was clearly taking advantage. He saw us, beelined straight to us and left without checking anybody else (true, due to the train departing, but still).
He could obviously have done things differently. A warning for next time. But nah. 120 Euros! Fuck this guy and fuck Italy - I thought for a few minutes. My wife thought it for a while longer, insisting he only picked on us because she was Asian.
Now for the good stuff
The rest of our few days here was just phenomenal. We tried one of the hikes but the recommended path had a typo in it, making us go the opposite route that would have been optimal, meaning we were going entirely uphill to the worst of the 5 villages, in 40C weather. It was still a lot of fun thought, we're fighters.
We did some beach time of course, including some night swimming, but honestly beaches in Italy seem quite disappointing (I looked around on Google maps too). Like, not only are they tiny, but they're consistently coated with a thick layer of umbrellas, indicated privately owned areas you have to pay to sit on. There's usually a thin sliver of public beach but it's like trash and mud and with no space due to a billion tourists using it.
I think the umbrellas and sunbeds ruin the whole vibe and take all the space away from the beach itself, and when I was lying there, I was surrounded by, of course, loud Americans complaining about the small size of bathrooms and lack of air conditioning. How could I ever have a conversation with these people all around me?? It's just not for me.
The main point of this area was the beauty, the sunsets, the crystal clear water, the food and architecture, all of which was really nice for such a touristy place, but I think our next coastal efforts will absolutely be in Spain.
Some Animals
This is much more interesting to me than it is to anyone else. As you probably know I live in a megacity. There ain't much nature. So even the slightest inkling of a bug or a bird casually living among humans is pretty fascinating. Also, I like seeing the different cat types.
Drooling old man
The seagull was our signal to leave as it tried very hard to nick some of our jewelry! The innocent baby birds in the nest, on the other hand, I got no beef with.
The bee on the right was drowning in the ocean. My wife had me, who was lying on the sunbed at the time, clamber into the water waist deep in my clothes in a rush to rescue it. I found a random rock as a little space ship and took it to shore to rest where it will promptly be eaten by a seagull, no doubt.
A recommendation
You can buy tickets at machines, but depending on crowds, use the 'Trainline' app. Other than this incident, it's a great app and runs very smooth. Don't forget to 'Check in!' I got warned about that too by a nicer train guy who obviously knew I didn't know about that (not a thing in England on the same app).
Don't come here in a rush, and come here with intent to chill. There's not much to see in terms of like, ancient roman ruins or whatever, but there's some great restaurants and really cool holiday vibes.
Shop around for sunbeds. The prices vary quite a bit depending where you go and they're all basically the same