This April, after Eyjafjallajökull had thwarted a planned visit of an old friend in Spain and stranded us in my native Germany, my partner Deb and I spontaneously decided to take my dad's car to explore relatively nearby Italy instead. Our first stop on our impromptu tour was Cinque Terre, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and National Park consisting of five villages located along beautifully terraced hillsides on the Ligurian coast.
While it was bound to be a marvelous vacation, I did not expect to be stepping into a model study for ecocities and villages, which, for those of you who know me, inevitably put me in trigger-happy and note-taking research mode...
continued at Daily Kos...
