After our two nights in Levanto, we took the back
roads down into La Spezia, in itself not a pretty city as it is the main naval
port in Italy. But, on the outer edge of the Gulf of La Spezia sits the
picturesque village of Porto Venere. Together with all the other tourists, we
wandered through the castle, church and town, where we bought some local
foccacia specialities. We sat and ate our lunch in a park overlooking the gulf and
the rather magnificent yachts moored at the Valdettaro boatyard.
We had a quick run down the autostrada to Massa,
which together with Carrara is the capital of marble extraction and production
in Italy. We then turned left and began
our climb up into the Apuane Alps until we reached the Passo del Vestito at
1061 m. From here we had an impressive view over a number of marble quarries.
Ross picked some samples of marble, assuming that it was nearby that
Michelangelo had found his piece of rock for the statue of David.
Drifting down a twisty fun road on the other side we
came across the delightful little township of Isola Santo, nestled on a small
green/blue lake behind a hydroelectric barrage. Ross continued his rock sample
gathering.
There is a perfectly good main road from Castelnuovo
di Garfagnana up over the ridge from Tuscany into Emilia-Romagna but clever
Katie, our GPS, took us on a short cut. It was shorter, but the road up to San
Pellegrino in Alpe was the steepest we had tried in our whole trip. We had to
admit that it was worth it for the views from the top. On regaining the main
road we continued on to Fanano where we spent a long and very pleasant evening
with Gianmarco and Cristina.
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