Manarola

Interesting facts

The facade of the Gothic church of San Lorenzo, built of local sandstone, is set with a rose window of Carrara marble dated 1375.

The village's main street runs over a covered stream that flowed in the open until 1950, crossed by eleven small stone bridges.

In July 1545 the villagers drove off a flotilla of galleys led by the Ottoman corsair Dragut, with help from neighbouring Riomaggiore.

Manarola grew from people moving down to the sea from the Val di Vara and the Roman-era settlement of Volastra once raids by Muslim pirates had declined.

Besides the mill-wheel explanation, another uncertain theory derives the name from the Latin Manium arula, a small shrine to the spirits of the dead.

For the two crucified thieves in his illuminated scenes, Mario Andreoli used about 15,000 light bulbs, and he built the figures from recycled shutters and plastic crates.

The very first cross Andreoli lit on the hillside was powered by a car battery; he died in December 2022 at the age of 94.

Every 10 August, for the feast of the patron saint Lawrence, the saint's statue is carried by boat from the Palaedo landing to the harbour.

The Via dell'Amore was cut into the cliff between 1926 and 1928 as a service path for workers building the railway.

The village cemetery on the Punta Bonfiglio headland bears closing lines from Vincenzo Cardarelli's poem Liguria on its facade.

Why it is worth it

Manarola is the smallest drama of the Cinque Terre told at full volume. Tall, narrow houses painted in reds, yellows and pinks are packed onto a spur of dark rock that ends abruptly above the Ligurian Sea, with a tiny harbour cut into the stone at its foot. Behind the village the hillsides are carved into terraces of vines held up by dry-stone walls, and it is the combination of the steep coloured town and the worked landscape above it that makes the view from the coastal path so unforgettable, especially as the light goes down in the evening.

It may be the oldest of the five villages. The cornerstone of its church of San Lorenzo is dated 1338, and the name is usually traced to the Latin magna rota, a large wheel, taken to mean a mill wheel. For centuries people here lived from fishing and from wine, above all Sciacchetrà, a wine from those terraces mentioned already in Roman writings. The painter Antonio Discovolo, who worked here in the first half of the 20th century, made the village one of his subjects, and in recent years its silhouette has inspired settings in video games and Pixar's film Luca.

Manarola has one unusual winter spectacle. Beginning in 1961, a local man, Mario Andreoli, built a nativity scene from lights and figures across the hillside above the village; it grew into what was recognised in 2007 as the largest illuminated nativity scene in the world, and it is switched on each year on 8 December. The whole coast, with Portovenere and the islands, has been a World Heritage Site since 1997. Between Manarola and Riomaggiore runs the Via dell'Amore, a short cliffside path of about a kilometre.

Getting there

Manarola is part of the municipality of Riomaggiore, about 8 km from La Spezia. It has its own station on the Genoa–Pisa railway line, and regional Cinque Terre trains from La Spezia Centrale take around ten minutes. The nearest international airport is Pisa International Airport (PSA), about 71 km away in a straight line.

Manarola

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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