I wasn’t in the mood to drive much today, so we explored the local area. First of all we drove up to Grisolia, the hilltop town you can see from the piazza of Maiera’.  It is separated by a deep and just about impassible ravine from Maiera’, so the only thing to do was plot another course down the mountainside and up the next.

Grisolia is clearly much larger than Maiera’, but not nearly as nice, although probably as ancient.  We drove in, parked, walked about 50 meters past grey buildings with crumbling exteriors and weather-beaten, unpainted doors.  My enthusiasm for the project had folded, and I suggested that we just bag it.  So we did, and headed down to check out the beach.

The beach looked blue, warm and inviting from our hotel.

 

From the shore, it looked calm out to sea, but the waves pounded the shore with a thundering boom, and looked very rough.  How rough it was, I found out when I waded out into the surf up to my knees. The force of the surf all but knocked me over, although the water was not cold at all.  There was only a little sand, the rest of the beach was stones ground fine from the rocky shore by the sea.  It was hard to walk on.  Without sandals, it hurt your feet, and with sandals, the stones got caught under your feet and hurt, too.

The beach experience on these shores is very different from that in the USA.  It seemed to me to point to a very different philosophy about the ownership of natural resources in a country.  There seems to be little or no idea that the shoreline, for example, should be owned by the public.  Theoretically while this is true, it is in fact under the control of the government, which uses this resource to garner more income, rather than for the enjoyment of the public.  Sorry, public, you have to pay.

As in Castiglioncello, a lot of the shoreline was given over to beach concessions, where you have to rent your chair or lounge, and you get an umbrella.  Since it was a weekday, the concessions were deserted, but so was the beach, except for one group of women with a small boy.  We had brought our bathing suits to Italy, and were hoping for another swim, but it was clearly not a swimming beach.