Italy's Ligurian coast

Tell people in Britain that you're going to the Cinque Terre and the most common response is likely to be a blank stare. "The what?" they'll say. So you'll have to explain that they are a string of villages built into the cliffs on the coast of Liguria, the province north of Tuscany. You'll let slip that they are difficult to get to. Due to the extremely steep terrain, cars are inadvisable and, indeed, banned in most of the villages. The favoured forms of transport are rail and boat. You may well find yourself translating cinque terre for them ("five lands") and, as unsolicited language lessons are not a good idea in everyday conversion, you'll probably end up sounding like a bit of an eejit.

I'm not sure why the Cinque Terre are such a well-kept secret in the UK. The British love Italy, after all, and always have. It can't just be selective Tuscany blindness, can it? It seems odd that these villages have escaped the British tourist radar. Because, let me tell you, they register on everyone else's.

The British bafflement about the Cinque Terre hadn't prepared me. I think I really did believe I might be arriving in some tiny, undiscovered backwater where I would probably be the only foreigner. I had a little trouble finding a hotel booking, true, but presumed that this was because there weren't many hotels. What other reason could there possibly be? This was spring, after all, not high summer.

The train pulled us north from Pisa and the flat, agricultural plains gave way to gentle slopes, then hills, then bigger hills, then mountains, and then whole crags with summits hidden in cloud. We were plunged into tunnel after tunnel, one following straight after the other. In the photoflash moment between them, it was possible to glimpse a vertiginous drop and the turquoise-green Ligurian Sea, foaming and thrashing at the base of the cliffs.

When I alighted at my chosen Cinque Terre destination, a village called Vernazza, I was still in my bubble. There was a winding cobbled street ahead of us, and a stall selling oranges. You could hear accordion music coming from somewhere and there was a pungent odour of coffee. How perfect a place was this? It was like stepping into the set of Cinema Paradiso.

Then I rounded a corner and came slap-bang into a wall of people who had stopped in the middle of the road to listen to their guide talking about the history of viniculture. There was no way through them. There was no way around them. I said "excuse me" in as many languages as I could recall (which is, admittedly, not many), then I gave up and just battled my way through, dragging my child and suitcase after me.

Vernazza is the fourth in the string of five villages, heading north, and reputed to be the prettiest. Like most of the Cinque Terre settlements it dates from Roman times, when it was known as Vulnetia. There is no gradual incline of land towards sea here: the rocky headlands of north-west Italy plunge precipitously into the ocean and the houses must cling on as best they can.

Most of the village is built into a rocky promontory, on top of which stands an 11th-century castle with possibly the best views of any real estate anywhere in the world. The streets - if you can call a narrow stone staircase squeezed between buildings a "street" - twist and twine down towards Vernazza's natural harbour. Swimming out from the beach or off the rocks, you get the sense of being in the middle of an immense amphitheatre: the village, with its ochre and red houses, the church, the campanile and the castle on one side and two sheer expanses of terraced vineyards enclosing you on the other.

The railway runs behind the village and, standing on the beach, you can watch the trains going backwards and forwards before they disappear into a gap in the mountain. My three-year-old son was in heaven. Eminently mouldable sand, a plethora of shells, rock pools with crabs, fish and sea anenomes: all this and trains. It was almost impossible for him to believe. When we first made it on to the beach he just stood in amazement, stunned into immobility by all that was on offer.

The problem with a village the size of Vernazza, however, is that if it has more than a certain number of visitors, the whole place becomes untenable. The village has roughly 1,000 inhabitants; it is built and designed to give shelter to a thousand people. Add to that an astonishing volume of tourists and you get something just short of chaos. The tiny stone staircases clog and jam, you cannot walk two metres without having to stop and wait for the crowds to part or abate, the main drag at midday is like Oxford Street on the last Saturday before Christmas. The restaurant chairs spill out over the streets, litter piles up in the gutter and on the beach, the locals' patience wears thin. The pensiones are all booked up from March to November. The queues at shop tills, toilets and ticket booths would stretch anyone's patience.

A boat arrives and departs every hour, disgorging people on to the tiny dock; the trains come through four times an hour, letting off more and more, until Vernazza is bursting, boiling over with tourists. Germans, Americans and French, they all seem to be, and mainly tour groups.

I have a passionate and prejudiced dislike of the tour group. What's wrong with these people that they feel compelled to move about the world with no fewer than 30 companions?

It is a particular irritation that nowhere in the Cinque Terre is big enough to absorb a tour group. Should one hove into view in Rome or Florence, you can escape down an alley or just turn your back. But here, in these ancient, miniature villages, you can't get away. One minute you're alone with your child, the blue sea and the distant horizon when all of a sudden you are stampeded by a herd of sexagenarians in beige leisurewear. Or a horde of interlocked teenagers in falling-down jeans. It's always one or the other.

Something happens to people when they're in groups. They seem to surrender free will and also basic intelligence. We are on a platform, attempting to board a train to the next village, but the 40 adults ahead of us have momentarily lost sight of their group leader. They panic, shouting, gesticulating, swarming around the open train doors, none of them boarding. No one else on the platform is able to get past, either towards the train or out of the station. The * * train is being delayed, everyone is getting hot in the noonday sun and I want to roar, "Have none of you ever got on a train before?"

As a cure for tour-group-itis, we decided to head for the hills. The Cinque Terre are famous as much for the aesthetics of the five villages as for a hiking path that weaves along the coast between the railway and the water, linking the settlements to form a hiker's paradise. You're in the mountains, you're by the sea, and you're never more than a couple of hours away from a cold beer and a plate of exquisite Italian food.

Depending on how much eating and drinking you do along the way, the complete trip will take you somewhere between four hours and an entire day. Italy being Italy, it seems a shame to rush it. The trail takes you through shady olive groves, along high cliff-tops, past temptingly deserted pebbly beaches. It is one of those walks where it almost seems a shame to miss it all by walking. You want to spend most of your time stopping and staring. It's the desire to get to the next village - and the next plate of linguine - that ultimately keeps you going.

Like the villages themselves, the path is hardly a secret. People with climbing boots and those funny spiky sticks beetle back and forth on it all day long. But physical exertion seems to be anathema to the tour group, so only on this hike is it possible to get anything resembling solitude. More serious walkers can take advantage of a complex and well-maintained network of trails stretching up into the mountains behind the villages. If you like walking, swimming and eating, or at least a combination of all three, it would be hard to find a more perfect holiday destination.

The region is beautiful, one of the most breathtaking coastlines I've ever seen. Each village is unique. Riomaggiore has a curving path that meanders up the hillside, as well as a lift if you're feeling lazy. Manarola is home to the most spectacularly placed playground I've ever seen: on a headland overlooking the Ligurian Sea, surrounded by terraces of lemon trees. In Monterosso you can comb the beach for smooth, multicoloured stones, shot through with veins of marble and quartz, and then eat a devastatingly delicious spaghetti al mare at Ristorante Ciak.

To reach Corniglia you must first hike up 400 or so red-brick steps strewn with camellia and marguerite flowers. I liked Corniglia particularly. It's the only one that has a road to it and the only one that doesn't have a beach or, indeed, any contact with the sea. High, high up on a clifftop, it is hemmed in by vineyards. And not just any vineyards: there were wine bottles from Corniglia excavated at Pompeii. It feels closer to real life than do any of the others; there is the sense that people actually live in its crazed, higgledy-piggledy streets.

The rest of the Cinque Terre leaves me in a quandary. It is an extraordinary place, this stretch of sea and cliff and rock, with its five villages. But it is so choked by tourism that it can barely breathe. Other parts of Italy seem able to cope with the regular onslaught of eager crowds but the Cinque Terre, for whatever reason, does not. The result is that it feels oddly like an edifice, a construction, a theme park representing "Italy" - or at least the foreigner fantasy of Italy, complete with pizzas, piazzas, sun, sea and real talking Italians.

In Las Vegas you can already find absurdly oversized casino hotels that purport to represent Venice and the lakeside village of Bellagio. If they decide to build another, the next false, fibreglass façade will probably be Vernazza.

At about six in the evening, the streets empty, the beach becomes deserted, the tour groups vanish and, for the first time all day, a calm descends. The Vernazzans come out and sit on benches in the main piazza, a busker comes by and plays ragtime on a clarinet. Children chase balloons and the extensive population of village cats. It's possible to see, for an hour or two, what the Cinque Terre could be like - or perhaps what it was once like.

I wanted to love it and part of me did - who couldn't love such a stunning place? But the other part of me couldn't wait to get on a train out of there, away from the hordes. Why it remains a largely unfamiliar destination to the British is still a mystery to me. But perhaps it's better that way.

Maggie O'Farrell's new novel, 'The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox', is published in August

TRAVELLER'S GUIDE

GETTING THERE

Airlines serving Pisa include Jet2 (0871 226 1737; www.jet2.com) from Belfast, Edinburgh, Newcastle Leeds/Bradford and Manchester; Ryanair (0871 246 0000; www.ryanair.com) from Glasgow, Stansted and Liverpool; easyJet (0905 821 0905; www.easyJet.com) from Bristol; and BA (0870 850 9850; www.ba.com) from Gatwick. You can buy an environmental "offset" from Climate Care (01865 207 000; www.climatecare.org). For a return flight from London to Pisa this is £2.

Trains from Pisa to Vernazza take around 90 minutes with a change at Spezia (www.trenitalia.com).

STAYING THERE

Trattoria Gianni Franzi, Piazza G Marconi 5, Vernazza (00 39 018 782 1003; www.giannifranzi.it). Doubles start at €80 (£57).

EATING & DRINKING THERE

Ristorante Ciak La Lampara, Piazza Don Minzoni 6, Monterosso (00 39 0187 817014).

FURTHER INFORMATION

www.italiantouristboard.co.uk; 020-7408 1254

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