Finally for the last (long overdue) installment of our Cinque Terre trip! One of my goals while I was in Italy was to explore a castle! I wasn't expecting to find that in Porto Venere, our last stop of the weekend. It was located to the far side of the city and was beautiful to walk through! For being a castle that you need to pay to get into, it was surprising authentic to its original design, ruins and all, not overrun with tourism by any means. It's the kind I had expected to see on a hiking trail, blocked off to the public. Fortunately, I suppose, I didn't need to resort to that ;)
The castle ran right into the city, which was pretty similar to Cinque Terre. The buildings were colorful and built in the same architecture, if not a little taller and a touch more spread out. Porto Venere was also quite a bit larger, central being very compact and slowly branching out to the other end of town into hotels, restaurants, and apartment buildings. When you walked up towards the back of the town, away from the water, you would come across walls from the original castle, bits and pieces of ruins. In some streets, on one side you would see the reds and yellows and oranges of the newer buildings and the other, old brickwork laid in the time the castle was constructed. It was a very cool mesh of the two eras!
I'm going through all my photos and I'm realizing almost half the pictures I took were in this castle and I have very few of Porto Venere itself... These two pictures should at least kind of give you an idea of the castle walls and newer buildings looked like together!
The architecture was just so cool!!! I couldn't get enough of it!!
 |
| The Royal Garden of Hyrule, anyone? It felt like videogame material!! |
No comments:
Post a Comment