Nature broke that pact Oct. 25, when a violent downpour unleashed unprecedented fury on the town of Vernazza and the surrounding hills along Italy’s northwestern coast, provoking dozens of landslides that swept a sludgy river of earth, trees, cars and debris onto the small seaside settlement. The bodies of three townspeople swept out to sea were recovered weeks later in French coastal waters.
Two months along, much of the mud and debris — which reached about 13 feet, just below the height of first-floor balconies — has been cleared from Vernazza’s main street, which was a lively succession of restaurants, bars and tourist shops.Barely a quarter of the town’s 600 residents returned by early January to their homes, but the alleys resonate with the sounds of heavy machinery, drilling and hammering. Though dressed in the neon colors of public safety workers, many of the crew members are local volunteers, men and women from Vernazza or nearby towns, come to give a hand as best they can.
Matteo Barletta, an architect mapping damage done to the town’s buildings, said that several teams were at work on the reconstruction, and that a list of priorities had been set. “The bakery, pharmacy, tobacconist, bank, fish shop and butcher, these are to reopen to reactivate the town,” he said.
Said Mayor Vincenzo Resasco, “There’s a lot of work to be done, because Vernazza is still not secure. The territory isn’t in the condition to withstand even normal rainfalls.
Securing the town includes painstakingly restoring the stone walls that delineate the terraced hilltops that surmount it. “With the stones that came down, we’ve recovered enough to build a second wall of China,” Resasco said.
These man-made terraced patches where vines and olive trees have been cultivated for centuries once ensured the survival of the five villages, best reached by water until the advent of the railway.
Tourism changed Cinque Terre, and not for the better, said Claudio Frigerio, a retired union worker and activist who has long lobbied for a more environmentally conscious approach to the area’s development. While tourism has been a lifeline, the crowds sometimes give the walking paths a rush-hour intensity. Tour groups and cruises can swell visitors here to around 2.5 million a year.
And as tourism supplanted farming and fishing as the town’s chief economy, maintenance of the terraced hills lagged, an oversight that many say was a contributing factor to the devastation of Oct 25. In 1951, about 3,500 acres were cultivated in the Cinque Terre. Today, there are fewer than 275, according to Vernazza town officials.
The Cinque Terre is one of the few rural areas in Italy where people don’t leave “because there is work here,” he said.
Angelo Maria Betta, mayor of Monterosso al Mare, another Cinque Terre town badly damaged, cannot wait to reopen flooded businesses for the spring. “If we don’t fix the Cinque Terre, we’re going to make a hole in the local economy that’s going to be hard to fill,” he said. Officials say the paths linking the towns will be open by Easter, and they vow to restore the towns as quickly as they can.