Leaving Lucca arriving Levanto

14/6/2011

Today we fair well the town of Lucca and head for Levanto and the five villages of Cinque Terre in the Italian National Park.
The lady at the BB in Lucca advised us to go and see the Marble mining hills around a town called Carrara and their Marmo caves, on our way. We sure are glad we did this, as it was a real adventure climbing up the mountain in the car and going through some pretty daunting tunnels to get to the mine face(see pics). These tunnels are used by the same big trucks and machinery that work at the mine so as you can imagine our little car was like a speck in the dust. Speaking of dust..there was plenty of that when the trucks went by. Then there was the skinny gravel road and did I mention the shear drop to the valley below.
It was quite unique to arrive at the mine face to find the workers having lunch in their smoko shed that doubles as the souvenir shop. We bought some marble dice here but there were plenty of other items that would have been much to heavy for us to bring back, like a solid marble mortar and pestle.
Once back down the mountain we set ‘Jennifer’ our GPS for Levanto and the Gentile Villa B&B. After a very long, windy but beautiful road through this Italian National park area we finally arrived at Levanto.
Once settled in we took a stroll around this beach town on the Italian rivera. It was great to see that Google maps had not let us down and our B&B, as planned was only a one minute walk to the levanto beach front that is just gorgeous.
Tomorrow we will relax on the beach and then over the next few days explore the 5 Terre(villages) of this area.