Rethinking Tourism With the Renewal of a Beloved Italian Path

In Riomaggiore, one of the five vertigo-inducing villages that make up Cinque Terre, which hug the steep cliffs of Italy’s northwestern coast, just about everyone has a memory of the Via dell’Amore, or Love’s Lane.

With breathtaking sunset views, the seacoast trail to neighboring Manarola was popular with local couples. “Otherwise what kind of love lane would it be?” said Marinella Cigliano, a 60-something who remembers getting caught by her mother while making out with a long-ago boyfriend.

As young mothers, “we brought our children in strollers, a place for afternoon walks,” said Roberta Pecunia, whose grandfather Brizio was among the local villagers who in the 1930s carved the path out of the rock face to link the towns. And when Vittoria Capellini’s father was a young boy, walking the trail to school, his mother would tell him to “run like crazy” over the sections of the trail where the cliff face was particularly unstable.

Eventually, a rockslide did occur, in 2012, closing the trail to the dismay of trekkers from around the world and the frustration of locals, now cut off from convenient access to services, schools and shops, not to mention relatives and friends. The only alternatives were oft-crowded trains, ferries or a sweat-inducing path up in the hills. “For us, it was a tragedy,” said Ms. Cigliano, who runs a luggage deposit near the Riomaggiore train station.

The trail reopened to tourists this month after a 24 million euro makeover — about $26 million — designed to secure the cliffs from repeat accidents, even as local officials have been pondering the effect that the reopening will have on an area whose popularity has risen stratospherically in recent years.

“The kind of tourism that leads people to seeing the Cinque Terre as a sort of Disneyland,” said Massimo Giacchetta, the regional president of a small-business association.