I don't mean to imply that all we did in the Cinque Terre was eat and drink, but food is an important element of culture, and the Cinque Terre is a fantastic place to eat and drink, so one more post on the prodotti locali...
Olives. Along with wine grapes, the staple crop of Cinque Terre agriculture from the earliest days. Olive oil is, obviously, foundational in Mediterranean cuisine.
Specifically, olive oil is one of the few ingredients in pesto, which originated here in Liguria. We ate pesto on several occasions—most memorably at Osteria Maité in Riomaggiore, where Chef Luca schooled us in the traditional methods for preparing it, with special attention to the proper local ingredients (notably basilico Genovese and the lightest possible olive oil) and techniques (grinding, not stirring, as he kindly admonished us, for the better part of an hour). Pesto is often served on trofie, a wheat-and-potato pasta with an open twist (as opposed to the tighter twist of rotini), but Luca served us home-made testaroli.
[Luca and our crew.]
[Juliet hard at work.]
[Pesto on testaroli.]
Tomatoes: See above re: "foundational in Mediterranean cuisine".
Oranges and lemons. The fertile soil and warm climate of the Cinque Terre is very conducive to citrus fruits. Oranges are grown in many parts of Italy, but I believe lemons are only widely grown in Liguria (including, of course, the Cinque Terre) and farther south on the Amalfi coast near Sorrento.
Shops in the Cinque Terre sell all manner of lemon-flavoured and lemon-scented products—lemonade, lemon candies, lemon soaps, and of course lemons themselves...
...but our favourite was limoncino (called limoncello elsewhere in Italy), a sweet but strong lemon liqueur. Thus far, we've had no luck at all finding it here in the States; we may resort to a DIY concoction of lemon-infused vodka and simple syrup to get our limoncino fix stateside.
Apparently none of our limoncino bottles (we tried several varieties, as well as an orange liqueur known as mandarino) lasted long enough to be photographed, but we did see a shop where some of it was made.
Oh, and gelato! There are plenty of gelaterias in the Cinque Terre—it's not unusual to find clusters of two or three competing for both the local and tourist trade—and fragola e limone (strawberry and lemon) gelato was my go-to refresher in the stifling early-August heat. When that wasn't enough, there were lemon granitas, the Five Lands' answer to Baltimore- or Louisiana-style snowballs: sour, icy, and refreshing.
Miscellaneous fruit. We saw other fruits, including figs, passionfruit and a variety of berries, in the back streets and alleys of the villages. The Cinque Terre's not a bad place to be a frugivore.
Summary: The Cinque Terre is blessed with many restaurants—fancy, casual, and everything in between—not to mention cafés, wine bars, and the aforementioned gelaterias. And every village has at least one bottega where locals and visitors alike can shop for their daily groceries. So yes, we ate and drank well—very well, in fact. But we also discovered the "Cinque Terre diet". Extensive walking in steep terrain and oppressive heat positively requires the consumption of gelato and granitas, and encourages liberal indulgence in pasta, seafood, pizza, and focaccia, all of which must of course be accompanied by appropriate amounts of wine, beer, and limoncino—and for all that, we all lost weight.
No wonder everyone here is so happy.
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