When I was first asked about going to Cinque Terra, I didn’t have a clue where it was. “Northern Italy – on the west coast, north of Pisa,” I was told. “Not quite on the French border. At the top of the boot!” I consulted my iPhone Google atlas and read some travel essays.

What first clicked, oddly perhaps, was that Cinque Terre was where Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned, on a midterm break from Oxford. Further social inquiries with friends revealed that it had a wonderful series of town-to-town hikes, connected to one another along a cliffy, beachless coast. The map showed them, south to north, as Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare.