The Ligurian Towns of Imperia & Loana

8:30 am, having been woken up by the bin lorries early call, (we forgot to mention that in our last blog, but essentially the streets were too narrow for normal sized bin lorries so the town had at least a dozen or so smaller versions which lined up every morning alongside the quay and emptied their contents in the full sized one, not an alarm call we cherished!). Anyway we soon set sail for Imperia, 12 NM’s up the coast, in an ENE 4 gusting 5, the direction we were going in, so we had a rather lively sail, with multiple tacks and partially reefed sails to finally arrive at Imperia at midday with our ships log of recording that we have actually done 21 miles!

We had a spot reserved in the marina/port and ended up pretty close to Jakob and his family again, who all sat on the bow of their yacht, watching us manoeuvre Seaclusion into her spot, no pressure!

As we were only stopping for the one night here, we of course donned our walking shoes to go exploring and will as ever let the pics do the talking, thankfully we didn’t get lost in this town, helped no doubt by a tiny vehicular railway to take us up into the old town.

Imperia

This Ligurian city is said to be one of the region’s most unusual and charming cities, with its hill hamlets, and seaside city along the Riviera dei Fiori. Apparently the most unusual thing about Imperia is that it has two centers, two train stations, and two ports. That’s because it brought together rival towns Oneglio and Porto Maurizio, which were separated by the Torrente Impero. A bridge was constructed between them to span the river in 1842, but they didn’t truly coalesce until the city was formed and the town hall built at the half-way point between them. Today, Imperia is along the shore, but the ambiance of Oneglio and Porto Maurizio respectively are still distinct. That is as far as our history lesson goes because we have no idea which part of the city and which port we were in!

The following day we set sail for Loana. It was a beautiful sail, downwind and for the first time this summer we goosewinged (each sail out on opposite sides), all the way until we arrived at this Italian seaside town and grabbed a spot in its rather posh marina.

At first, as we walked along the front we didn’t think there was much to the place, but we soon discovered, one road back, this tiny narrow cobbled street that ran the breadth of the town, with a beautiful church and full of little shops, bars, restaurants and life! Prosecco and pizza was a must!

Loana

We then had a slow stroll back to the boat, as once again we were off in the morning, heading to Savona, early, as the forecast showed the later we left it to depart, the more feisty the sail was going to be!