Villa Montale: Staying in the Poet’s House

Villa Montale stands on the first slopes of Punta Mesco, above the Fegina shore in western Monterosso al Mare. It was built in 1880 as the summer house of the Montale family, and Eugenio Montale, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975, spent the summers of his childhood and youth here. We manage the second-floor apartment, named I Limoni: five bedrooms, three bathrooms, room for eleven. Read its story.

First, the obvious question

Is this really Eugenio Montale's house?

Yes. The Montale family spent their summers in this Liberty-style villa above Fegina, and the poet came here from early childhood into his thirties. Locally the house was known as the Villa of the Two Palms. Montale himself called it, less reverently, the pagoda giallognola, the yellowish pagoda.

This coast is where his first collection, Ossi di seppia, published in 1925, was born. Three of its best-known poems are rooted in what you can see from the house: I limoni, La casa dei doganieri and Punta del Mesco. The apartment we manage takes its name from the first of them.

A poem in every room

What waits for you upstairs

In each of the five bedrooms there is a poem, in the original Italian with an English translation facing it. Different room, different poem. It is the one thing guests photograph first, and it is the reason people who care about poetry choose this house over one with the same view.

At check-in we hand you a folder, closed with a wax seal, holding the poem that gave the apartment its name. It is yours to take home. Guests tend to open it on the balcony rather than in the hallway, which is roughly where it was meant to be read.

What you actually rent

The I Limoni apartment

The villa is a private residence, partly adapted for guests. You are not renting the whole building: you are renting the second floor, which is a large apartment in its own right and the part with the frescoes.

• Five bedrooms: four doubles and one twin.
• Three bathrooms.
• Ten beds, plus an eleventh place in a chair bed.
• Air conditioning in every bedroom and in the living room.
• A fully equipped kitchen, and a dining table that seats the whole party.
• Balconies over the park and the sea, and a private portion of the garden with tables and chairs.
• An assigned parking space, which is rare this close to a Cinque Terre beach.

The living and dining room still carries its original painted ceiling, and the floors are terrazzo alla veneziana with inlaid rosettes. Nothing here has been stripped out and replaced with a rental-standard interior.

Before you fall in love with a photograph

Stairs, luggage and arrival times

The apartment is on the second floor of a nineteenth-century villa, so there are stairs and no lift. It is a beautiful house, not an adapted one, and we would rather tell you now than at the door.

Check-in is assisted, with our team present, and it runs until 22:00. Arrivals between 18:30 and 20:00 carry a supplement of 50 euros, and between 20:00 and 22:00 it is 80 euros. We cannot check anyone in after 22:00, so if your flight lands late it is worth telling us before you book, and we will work out the arrival with you.

Small dogs are welcome with a supplement, on a lead in the shared areas of the villa.

Where it puts you

Fegina, and the walk to the rest of the Cinque Terre

Fegina is the newer, western half of Monterosso, and it has the sand. The beaches are a few minutes below the house, the railway station is on the same side, and Monterosso is the only one of the five villages where a group can walk to dinner on flat ground. The old town is a level stroll along the seafront, through the tunnel that joins the two halves of the village.

For readers, and for walkers

The Montale literary trail

Monterosso created the Eugenio Montale Literary Park to mark forty years since his Nobel Prize. The route starts in Fegina, by the Giant and the villa itself, follows the terraces above the sea and ends in the old town, at the church and the cemetery where the family tomb stands, a place that appears in his verse.

If you want the walk rather than the reading, take path 590 from Monterosso up to Sant'Antonio del Mesco. It is 2.7 kilometres and about an hour and a quarter each way, easy going, and it ends at a ruined chapel with the whole coast below you. Guests staying at the villa are, in the most literal sense, starting from the poet's front door.

Eleven people, one table

Dinner at home, cooked for you

Booking a table for eleven in Monterosso in August is its own small ordeal. The alternative is to stay where you are: we can arrange a chef to cook in the apartment, or a private cooking class for the group, both in the house itself.

One practical note from the house rules: dinners and gatherings need to be agreed with us in advance, because the villa has other residents. Tell us and it is usually simple.

Who you are booking with

Book direct with us

Cinque Terre Riviera has been a licensed Italian tour operator since 1991 and has managed homes here directly since 2006, from an office on Via Roma in Vernazza. No platform sits between you and us, which is why the price is lower and the answers come from someone who has been inside the house.

• Free cancellation cover included, only on our official site.
• More than 1,600 guest reviews, averaging 4.43 out of 5.
• A welcome gift on arrival, and a local team on the ground throughout.
• Assisted check-in at the house, never a key in a box.
• Transfers, boat trips, cooking classes and a chef at home, arranged by us and not resold.

Travelling as a larger party? Villa Tanca sleeps twelve and stands a few minutes away in the same village. Taken together the two houses hold up to twenty-three.