This is where the trail really begins, where it stops being about getting from one village to another and becomes about the walking itself. The path narrows, pressed between the hillside and the drop to the sea. On your left, the terraces climb up in their ancient geometry—the muretti a secco, dry stone walls that have held these slopes in place for eight hundred years. Someone is still farming up there. You can see the stakes for the vines, the silver-green leaves of olive trees that were old when your grandparents were born.

The light is changing now, getting richer. It catches in the wild fennel growing between the stones, turns the agave flowers into torches. Below, the water is doing that thing it does in the evening, layering itself into bands of color—pale aquamarine close to shore where you can see the rocks, then green, then blue, then that deep almost-purple that means depth, real depth, the kind where the bottom drops away to nothing.

There’s a hidden bay below the path, just past the halfway point to Corniglia. You won’t find it on any map worth mentioning, and I’m not going to tell you exactly where it is—some things you find yourself or you don’t find at all. But you’ll hear it first, the particular sound of water moving over smooth stones, different from the open-sea sound you’ve been hearing. If you look carefully through the scrub oak and the mastic, you might catch the white flash of surf on rocks, a small crescent of beach that no one has touched since this morning, maybe longer.

My nonna used to say that walking this path in the evening meant you could smell what everyone was making for dinner—the garlic hitting hot olive oil in a hundred different kitchens, the particular sharpness of anchovies being rinsed of their salt, the green smell of basil being torn by hand. The wind carries it up from the villages on both sides. On Thursdays you might catch the wood smoke from the bakery ovens being fired up for tomorrow’s focaccia. In October, someone is always making passata, and the whole coast smells like tomatoes being put up for winter.

The train passes below, the evening run heading toward La Spezia. You hear the horn first, then see the silver flash moving between the tunnels. The sound echoes up the rock face, changes pitch in the distance. When I was small, I used to time my walks to the trains, using them the way other people use a watch. The 18:42 meant you had half an hour of good light left. The 19:17 meant you’d better know the path well, because the shadows were getting serious.

The last section into Corniglia is different. The path widens, becomes more of a proper trail. You’re higher now, and the views open up—you can see back to Vernazza, forward to Manarola, the whole sweep of coast laid out like a promise. The light is horizontal now, that last-gasp golden that photographers wait hours for. It makes everything look like it’s been dipped in honey—the stone, the vegetation, even your own hands when you look at them.

By the time you reach the village, the light is starting to fail. The street lamps are coming on. Someone is setting tables at the restaurant in the piazza, and the church bells ring for evening Mass, the way they have for five hundred years. You’re tired—the good kind of tired, the kind that comes from using your body the way it was meant to be used. Your legs will remember this tomorrow, especially those first steps out of Vernazza.

But for now, find a seat at one of the small bars in the upper village. Order something cold. Watch the sky do its final performance over the water—rose, then orange, then that particular violet that means the day is finished. The trail is dark now. The people who walked it this morning are already at dinner, posting their photos, planning tomorrow’s itinerary. They saw the Sentiero Azzurro in daylight, which is fine, which is good. But you saw it in the last light. And that makes all the difference.