The Vineyard Terraces, Cinque Terre · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone comes to the Cinque Terre for the postcard, the five toy-bright villages stacked above the sea, and almost nobody turns to look at the hills behind them, which is where the real wonder is. Those green slopes are not natural at all. They are built. Rising from a few metres above the waves to nearly five hundred, tier upon tier, are terraces held in place by walls of dry stone, laid without a drop of mortar, one block of sandstone balanced on another by hand. Nobody carted the stone in. It was dug out of the same hillside it now holds up. People have been doing this since around the year 1000, patching and rebuilding and extending, and the walls that survive today run to something like six thousand seven hundred kilometres, more, it is often said, than the Great Wall of China, all of it made by farmers with their bare hands to win a few narrow strips of soil for vines and olives and lemons. The strips even have a name in the local dialect, ciàn. So the view everyone photographs from the harbour, all that soft green climbing behind the coloured houses, is really the largest piece of handmade landscape most visitors will ever stand in front of without ever knowing it. The guidebooks point your camera at the sea. The miracle is at your back.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.