Cinque Terre villagers build Italian Utopia

RIOMAGGIORE, Italy, Sept 22: 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.

Buyers of the cottages nestled amid vines on stone terraces have to cultivate at least 3,000 square metres of vines, fruit trees or vegetables a back-breaking task on the steep slopes.

If they break the rule, they are expropriated.

Some of the vineyards are on slopes so vertiginously close to the sea that the grapes have to be harvested by boat.

Such hard work is not the idea most buyers have of tranquil country life.

COTTAGE CRACKDOWN

So far, the park has expropriated two owners of so-called ''rustici'': small, primitive cottages adjacent to farmland.

''They didn't comply with the rule that obliged them to farm the land, so because we're a national park we were able to take the cottages away,'' Bonanini said, adding the park was now in talks with the two families and they may be allowed back if they agreed to respect the regulations.

Angelo Pasini, a tanned, wiry 79-year-old with a white moustache who tends his vineyard near Riomaggiore, said the park's strict rules were appropriate for protecting such an exceptional territory.

''I consider myself lucky to have been born in the most beautiful place on earth,'' he said.

While villagers like the park's rules, the effect on outsiders remains to be seen.

The park is planning to slowly buy up all the cottages in the villages as they come on the market and lease them out on a 30-year basis to keep domestic control of the territory.

The park has hired a German natural therapist, Gerd Kleinpoppen, who lives in a little sanctuary on top of a hill and descends to the village to massage the limbs of elderly vintners and teach them light gymnastics.

Over coffee on the terrace of the sanctuary, he reflects on the changing fortunes of Cinque Terre and is sceptical about the park's property leasing plan.

''If you have farmed the land for 30 years and invested in the cottage, you're not going to give it up lightly,'' he said.

Bonanini is not put off.

He hopes to attract scientists who will study the unique territory and work on environmental projects, and artists who will contribute creatively to the community.

Once the park owns all the cottages, new tenants will be selected based on their professions and reasons for coming to Cinque Terre, and their willingness to respect local norms.

''That's how you create a world,'' Bonanini said.

REUTERS