Tramonti, the lord of the stairways

Up and down the ancient stairs. Tramonti is a handful of houses with a beautiful name, a stretch of the Levante Ligure after the Cinque Terre. It is an enchanted and somewhat secret place where land, sea and sky speak to each other, connected by hundreds of dry stone walls and steep staircases that climb the daring slopes. It is a place where the pungent smell of brackish combines with that of flowers, olive trees, vines and aromatic herbs. A few years ago, Luca Natale and his friends invented an association to recover the extraordinary paths traced over the centuries by people with a tenacious will. With picks, shovels, rasps and a lot of hard work, working for free, they restored thousands of steps and dry-stone walls that their ancestors had built to unite the small villages and tiny plots of land where 'rinforzato', the base of Sciacchetrà, was cultivated. The beginning was almost a nightmare so much was the degradation, but "every section of stairway recovered," says Natale, "every piece of land made walkable again, every ancient little house recovered contributes to bringing back to this paradise people in love with nature, landscapes, the emotions that only these places between sea and sky can give you. Visit the site