After Genoa, we drove southeast for about 2 hours to reach La Spezia, where we spent two nights. From there, we explored Cinque Terre (“Five Lands”) by train and by boat. If you like to join us on this epic road trip from the beginning in Switzerland, click here for the first post of the series.
La Spezia (The Spice) is the second largest city in the Liguria region after Genoa. It is an important Italian navy base, a major port and a seaside resort.
While it is a gateway to Cinque Terre, La Spezia is not visibly packed with tourists. Thankfully, the hotels and restaurants did not appear to have jacked up its prices as other touristy cities.
La Spezia has marinas for leisure boats but the atmosphere was completely different from the busy harbor at Genoa.
Ponte Thaon di Revel
Opened in 2013, the bridge vaguely resembles a large double-masted sailing boat connects the city with the port.
One morning from our hotel room, we saw an aircraft carrier departing from the port. Except in New York at The USS Intrepid Museum, we had never seen an aircraft carrier, let alone a working warship.
We saw many more warships in the harbor on our cruise to Cinque Terre. If you are curious, check out this link to a propaganda video of the Italian navy on a Ministry of Defense (Ministero della Difesa) page.
La Spezia was historically an important naval port. It was Napoleon Bonaparte who first came up with the idea of building a military presence in the Gulf of Spezia. In early 20th century, only La Spezia and Taranto were considered first class bases and equipped with a military shipyard.
During the Second World War, because of its strategic location across from North Africa, the naval base was heavily bombed by the Allies, but it was quickly renovated to full operation in the postwar period.
When the cold war was over in the early 90’s, military spending across Europe relaxed and La Spezia had become less important. Apparently, the port retained its 19th century layout and remains vulnerable to aerial attacks.
Another disadvantage of this naval base is the lack of any natural protection from surveillance. Our photographs suggest that military assets at the base are observable from routine civilian marine traffic.
Some areas of the city and nearby villages that are open to the sea lost their access due to the naval installations. Those areas are suffering economically as the city is slowly gravitating to tourism and will commercialize its water front in the future.
Our hotel is located a block from the promenade on the city’s water front. With all those palm trees, one could believe that we were somewhere in the Tropics.
As soon as we had checked in at the hotel, we headed out to Corniglia, our first village of Cinque Terre. To get to the main train station (Stazione La Spezia Centrale), rather than calling for a taxi, we wanted to try the city bus. Tickets were bought from a tobacconist nearby as we did not see any ticketing machine… and it took some time to figure out which bus to take. The public transport system in La Spezia is designed only to serve locals? To be fair to the system, we did not visit any tourist info center and were not equipped with a bus map. Later, we discovered their web site in English – https://www.atcesercizio.it/en/biglietti/.
If you like to follow us on this epic Italian road trip, click here for the next post. You can follow us from the beginning, go to our blog post: Road Trip from Lausanne to Tuscany.
