2-Bed Stone House in Calice al Cornoviglio | Holiday Home Above La Spezia & Bay of Poets



Liguria, La Spezia, Italy, Calice al Cornoviglio (Italy)
2 Bedrooms · 2 Bathrooms · 174m² Floor area
€230,000
House
Parking
2 Bedrooms
2 Bathrooms
174m²
Garden
Pool
Not furnished
Description
On a clear morning, you can stand on the terrace with a coffee and watch the light shift across the Gulf of La Spezia—the water catching silver between the headlands, Portovenere in the far distance, the hills dropping in ridges toward the coast. Church bells from the village below drift up before nine. The wood-fired pizza oven in the kitchen is still warm from the night before. This is the kind of Tuesday you've been daydreaming about for years.
Calice al Cornoviglio sits in the Ligurian hills at the precise point where the region folds into Tuscany, and that borderland quality defines everything about it. The air smells of pine resin and wild rosemary. The village itself is unhurried—there's a bar where the same men have been drinking espresso at the same hour for decades, a small shop that stocks far more than you'd expect, and a public pool with a view that would cost a fortune at any resort. A restaurant one kilometer down the lane does a ribollita that makes you reconsider every bowl of soup you've ever eaten. The community is tight-knit in the way that only small hilltop villages manage to be, and newcomers who put in the effort are genuinely welcomed.
The house itself is spread across three floors of beautifully renovated stone, 174 square meters in total, and it carries the weight of its past lightly. Ground floor: a vaulted cantina—the real thing, not decorative—plus a storeroom, bathroom, and an open-plan kitchen and dining space anchored by exposed stonework walls and a wood-fired pizza oven built into the stone. It's the kind of kitchen that makes cooking feel like an event. Up to the first floor and the split-level living room opens outward—fireplace on one side, terrace on the other, panoramic views in every direction you'd want to look. The terrace doubles as a secondary entrance, useful when you've come up from the garden with muddy boots and don't want to trek through the whole house. The second floor holds two bedrooms, each with a walk-in wardrobe—rare at this price point—and a second bathroom finished in marble. Wooden beams run the ceilings throughout. Air conditioning is installed. The place is light in a way that surprises people when they first walk in; the renovation has been done with real care for how the rooms breathe and feel at different hours of the day.
Outside there's a mature garden with a tool shed and those views—the ones that do something to your nervous system when you've been staring at a city skyline all year. Parking is a few steps from the front door, which sounds minor until you've navigated hillside Italian villages with nowhere to leave a car.
The position is genuinely strategic for exploring one of the most packed coastlines in Europe. The beaches of the Gulf of the Poets are 22 kilometers away—not a commute, just a drive through hills with the windows down. Lerici and San Terenzo sit at the edge of the gulf under their respective castles, pastel buildings stacked above the water, boats moored below. The marina at La Spezia, 20 kilometers distant, is the practical counterweight: a full-scale port city with a sprawling Saturday market, proper restaurants, excellent shops, banks, schools, and a new marina where chartering a boat for a day trip around the gulf is straightforward and genuinely worth doing. Go by water from La Spezia to Portovenere, anchor for lunch, come back via the Cinque Terre trail at sunset—that's a day that doesn't need any embellishment.
The Cinque Terre is 32 kilometers by road but feels closer by the coastal path. The five villages—Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, Monterosso—are connected by trails cut into the cliff face above the Ligurian Sea, and the walk between them is one of those things that stays with you. Stop in Vernazza, order anchovies marinated in olive oil and garlic with a glass of Sciacchetrà, the local passito wine made from grapes grown on vertiginous terraced slopes above the sea. It's the right thing to eat in the right place.
Twenty kilometers in the other direction, Sarzana is the kind of medieval market town that would be mobbed with tourists if it were in Umbria or Provence. Here it remains largely itself: wide cobbled piazzas, a Malaspina fortress, lanes lined with antique dealers and good coffee, and on summer evenings, the whole town comes alive with outdoor antique markets, musicians setting up in doorways, and the castle illuminated against the dark. Thursday's general market takes over the streets entirely. The train station connects directly to Pisa, Florence, Genova, and the Cinque Terre—meaning that on a whim, a day in Florence is entirely possible without getting in the car.
Seasonally, the area earns its keep year-round. Spring in the hills means wild flowers on every slope and olive groves coming back into leaf—hike the Alta Via dei Monti Liguri and you'll have the trails mostly to yourself. Summer is warm and reliably sunny, hot enough to make the gulf beaches feel necessary, cool enough in the evenings at altitude to sleep without the air conditioning running. Autumn brings the chestnut harvest, truffle fairs in the villages, and the vendemmia—grape harvest—across the Colli di Luni wine zone just to the south, which produces a sharp, mineral Vermentino that pairs unreasonably well with the local seafood. Winter is mild by northern European standards; the hills see occasional snow, the coast rarely does, and the valleys hold a blue-gold light in the low sun that photographers come specifically to capture.
Pisa airport is 80 kilometers away, roughly an hour's drive on a clear day. Genova airport is 100 kilometers north. Either makes the property genuinely accessible for a long weekend, not just a two-week summer trip—which matters considerably when thinking about rental yield. Properties at this quality level, in this position between the Cinque Terre and the Gulf of the Poets, are actively sought by the international holiday rental market from April through October. For international buyers, Italy's flat-tax residency scheme and the practical ease of EU property ownership make the numbers worth examining closely with a local commercialista.
Key features at a glance:
- Fully renovated 174 sqm stone house across three floors in a Ligurian hillside hamlet
- Wood-fired pizza oven integrated into the open-plan stone kitchen and dining area
- Vaulted cantina on the ground floor—original architectural feature retained
- Split-level first-floor living room with fireplace and panoramic terrace
- Two bedrooms, each with walk-in wardrobes, second-floor bathroom in marble
- Air conditioning throughout, wooden beam ceilings, light and well-ventilated interiors
- Mature private garden with tool shed and unobstructed hill and coastal views
- Parking directly adjacent to the property
- Village amenities on-site: bar, shop, restaurant 1km, public pool with views
- 22km to Gulf of the Poets beaches, 32km to the Cinque Terre UNESCO villages
- 20km to La Spezia (Saturday market, marina, boat hire), 20km to Sarzana (train connections)
- Pisa airport 80km, Genova airport 100km—accessible for short-break ownership
- Strong holiday rental market position between two of Liguria's top visitor destinations
- Borderland location giving access to both Ligurian coast and Tuscan interior
Priced at €230,000 for a property of this size, condition, and location, this is a serious opportunity in a market where well-renovated stone houses between La Spezia and the Cinque Terre have been steadily appreciating. Come and see what a Tuesday morning on that terrace actually feels like—get in touch with the Homestra team today to arrange a viewing.
Details
- Amount of bedrooms
- 2
- Size
- 174m²
- Price per m²
- €1,322
- Garden size
- 0m²
- Has Garden
- Yes
- Has Parking
- Yes
- Has Basement
- No
- Condition
- good
- Amount of Bathrooms
- 2
- Has swimming pool
- Yes
- Property type
- House
- Energy label
Unknown
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