Villagers build Italian utopia

Amid the wooden fishing boats, pastel-coloured houses and maze-like stairways of the five tiny Cinque Terre villages, a new world is in the making.

Squeezed between steep vineyards and the Mediterranean sea, the hamlets on the northwestern Ligurian coast used to be among Italy's poorest. Now residents receive free natural medicine, massage treatments and health screenings. Cars are banned, replaced by free electric shuttles. There is a herbal cosmetics laboratory, subsidised organic farming and exchanges with international artists and scientists.

Not bad for a place that four decades ago did not even have a road, and where vintners ate dry bread dipped into a mix of water and wine sediment. Much of the good life is due to a boom in tourism. About 2.5 million visitors a year hike along the footpaths that connect the quaint hamlets, each paying an entrance fee to the national park that covers the area.

But unlike many other Italian villages, which have turned from slums to theme parks, their farmhouses converted into weekend retreats, Cinque Terre is trying to keep control of its destiny as it puts centuries of deprivation behind it.

"My generation grew up in black misery," said 54-year-old Franco Bonanini, the former mayor who is now head of the national park and the driving force behind its transformation to a seaside utopia.

People Power

The son of poor vintners remembers a time when his village's fortune depended on the whims of outsiders.

"When I was little, the worst were the two weeks when the wine speculators came," he told Reuters, sitting in his spacious office overlooking Riomaggiore and the sea. He recalls his parents' excitement before the wine merchants' visit, their hopes for a good sale, contrasted by the humiliation of the visits themselves the traders would reject the food they were offered and complain about the quality of the wine, then carry it all off at half price.

So when the tourism industry discovered Cinque Terre and the first property speculators arrived, Bonanini swore that this time Cinque Terre's villagers would not be cheated. The area was granted national park status six years ago. As a park, the five villages have been able to push through some of their most radical measures, such as the car ban.

Visitors leave their cars in parking spaces close to the villages and transfer to small buses that run on electricity or methane gas. Residents use the shuttles for free. But the most controversial move may be the real estate rules for outside buyers a key element of the park's strategy to keep locals in charge and maintain a farming culture.