Wanderlust awakening

Most people usually choose Italy as a destination mainly because of these three reasons: good food, pulsating history, and excellent food. Everything suddenly appears to be more enriching when your experience is sprinkled with Renaissance tiny details and accompanied with Mediterranean flavors, slowly twisting your human senses.
One thing you do not expect from an Italian trip though is to discover what is beyond these fulfilled senses. Trust me.

Manarola doesn’t ring a bell to most of us, it might represent so many things at once: an exotic place in the middle of nowhere, some piece of sophisticated furniture or even some kind of fancy dessert. When you adventure yourself in searching on Google about it, your mind finally settles down and you get this “aha moment” feeling: Cinque Terre! Those Italian visually ecstatic lands with vibrant colorful terraces right next to the sea.

As I found myself staring at the tiny blissful houses from the train window, I wondered for not even a thousandth of a second what would happen if I followed my inner curiosity and trust my recently discovered wanderlust calling and just get out of the train right there, without reaching my final destination. Next thing I know, I was taking a deep breath of fresh air leaving the deserted train station behind and heading hesitatingly towards the only road that I was seeing in front of my eyes.

With my walnut-melon-coconut flavored gelato almost melting between my fingers, I rambled along in veneration to enjoy the vivid colors dancing and coupling with each other on the façades, subtly inviting you to change itineraries once in a while and getting you drunk in the beauty of this afternoon.
When I sat down on the mint colored bench on one of the hills thinking Manarola’d been the only foreign place I had explored so intensively, I realized some old olive trees were hiding something looking like the beginning of a new footpath.
Happily, I allowed it to guide me to a place beyond my imagination: a peaceful columbarium dressed in the most harmonious hues, whispering hundreds of fearless untold stories. It was beyond perfect.

Slowly letting my backpack slide at my feet, I looked back and sat down on the ground. As watching the clear April sky melting into the Mediterranean Sea, I found myself part of an alliteration: silence, subconscious, serendipity.

And I felt all I had to do is just to be thankful.