Riomaggiore is the southernmost of the five Cinque Terre villages, its tall, tightly packed houses pouring down a narrow ravine toward a small slipway harbor where fishing boats are still hauled up onto the pavement each evening rather than moored in open water.
The village's main street runs directly along the line of the old stream bed, covered over long ago, and side alleys called carruggi climb steeply between houses painted in the same warm ochres and pinks found throughout the Cinque Terre. At the harbor's edge, the trailhead for the Via dell'Amore begins, a cliffside path cut in the 1920s originally to connect quarry and rail workers between Riomaggiore and Manarola, later reimagined and renamed for the couples who walked it. After dark, the tower houses along the ravine light up in a way that has made Riomaggiore's harbor one of the most photographed nighttime views on this stretch of coast.
