Behind thickets of beech trees, overgrown with nettles and beside a blue lake an hour north of Berlin, a villa that once belonged to a Nazi mastermind quietly rots.

No one knows what to do with the estate beside the Bogensee lake in Brandenburg. It was built for Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, by his grateful country just before the start of World War II. Owned by the State of Berlin today, it has sat moldering expensively on the public’s tab, along with a set of dramatic dormitories built later by the Communist Party to house an indoctrination school. It is a nearly 20-acre campus that echoes with the pasts of two totalitarian regimes.

Too burdensome for the state to continue carrying, prohibitively expensive for most real estate prospectors and tainted by history, Berlin has given up on selling or developing it.

Instead, it has offered to give the Nazi mansion away, free. (The taker, of course, would be subject to the government’s approval.)

In exasperated comments made to Parliament this spring, Stefan Evers, the state’s senator for finance, made the pitch — take it off our hands, or we will tear it down — setting off a flurry of interest in prospective takers from around the globe.

There were inquiries from a dermatologist who wanted to open a skin-care center and from a few bargain hunters, Mr. Evers said recently in an interview in his offices in Berlin. None have been suitable, he said.

An earlier inquiry, from an extreme-right group called the Reichsbürger movement, seemed to embody the authorities’ worst fears. The group denies the legitimacy of the current German state; some of its members are on trial for a plot to overthrow the government.

Such attention — that the estate’s association with the Nazi era might attract an unsavory buyer — partly accounts for the villa’s neglect.

“The history of the place is precisely the reason why Berlin would never hand this building over to private hands where there would be a risk that it could be misused,” Mr. Evers said.

The fate of the villa is not only a logistical quandary for Germany. It illustrates a long-term and larger conundrum, the grounds of which have shifted over time, experts say: whether to preserve or obliterate the many edifices from Germany’s hateful past.

Directly after World War II, the prevailing approach was to move on, ignoring prior ownership, so as not to risk reifying it, according to Peter Longerich, a historian and the author of “Goebbels,” a biography. Hitler’s apartment in Munich, for example, has little information detailing its history; it has long been a police station in which officers still use Hitler’s own wooden bookshelves, he said.

The benefit of its law enforcement tenants is that their presence keeps at bay Nazi sympathizers who sometimes make pilgrimages to such sites. Last year in Austria, the government moved to convert Hitler’s birthplace into a police station for this reason, drawing contentious debate.

But as the far right has re-emerged in German politics, there has been a shift in sentiment toward remembering the past, in order to never forget it.

“The dominant attitude in education for a long time was to, if possible, ignore many things of this period,” Mr. Longerich said. “But nobody has a greater sense of coming to terms with the past than Germans have, so there is an ongoing process,” he added. “And it might be that over time, ignorance will need to be overcome and people find it necessary to preserve this space.”

Just outside the center of Wandlitz, the wildwood has grown up around the house, blocking the door to the private cinema where Goebbels screened his propaganda films. Cobwebs cloak bedroom windows. And motes of dust drift through airy salons where he wined and dined Nazi leadership, and where his six children played beside the hearth — until he and his wife poisoned them all in the war’s final days.

Maintenance of the property costs 280,000 euros a year (nearly $306,000) just to keep it from falling into shambles, according to the buildings department. Restoration would not only be expensive but introduce another thorny issue that dogs preservationists who must deal with former structures from both the Nazi and Communist chapters of Germany’s past.

“If they look too beautiful, you re-aestheticize their reign,” said Thomas Weber, a professor of history and international affairs at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland. “But if you leave them but somehow destroy how they functioned at the time, then people will not understand, either.”

The mansion is filled with architectural flourishes that were popular among Nazi leaders, like its clever day-room windows that fold away into the floor — a touch also used in Hitler’s own vacation retreat in the Bavarian Alps. There is a bunker out back, too, just in case.

Other structures were added over time. Down a path, past headless concrete statues of intertwined lovers, are several almost Federal-style buildings. They were used as a Communist international youth college from the 1940s until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Up weed-sprouted steps and behind graffitied doors, their cavernous interiors hold barracks and an echoing auditorium.

It is a part of the site’s past often eclipsed by its Nazi heritage, said Gerwin Strobl, a modern history instructor at Cardiff University in Wales, who studies Germany. But it is one also painful to Germans. “In fact, it covers two German dictatorships in succession. That also explains why it is also so difficult to find a use for it,” Mr. Strobl said. “But buildings by themselves aren’t evil.”

On a bike ride on a recent Friday, a man and a woman in their 60s paused in front of what was the campus’s social center to take in the crumbling building. The pair, Marita and Frank Bernhardt, had met there as students in 1978.

She learned of its Nazi past only after reunification, Ms. Bernhardt said. “That’s why it has a bitter aftertaste,” she said of returning for the first time. And yet, it was where she and her husband had fallen in love. “The memories are still nice.”

After hearing about Berlin’s offer to give away the property, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the chairman of the European Jewish Association, sent an open letter offering to convert it into an education center to counter all forms of hate.

“It is an important message to anyone,” Rabbi Margolin said. “That even the darkest place in the world can become a source of light.”

Such a project is worthy, Mr. Evers said, but the issue is financing. Walter Reich, the former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said it was Germany’s obligation to help pay. “That’s part of the burden of German history,” Dr. Reich said in an email. “Germany’s unmasterable past.”

As the ash and alder creep over the villa, Oliver Borchert, the mayor of Wandlitz, has for years fended off interest from extreme right-wingers, including the coup-plotting Reichsbürger group.

The place needs more than upkeep — it needs transformation, Mr. Borchert said: “You have to find a use that can stand against and reflect the shadows of the house and its history.”

With cars being torched and mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers under attack, the riots that swept Britain over the past two weeks have posed the first direct challenge to the new prime minister, Keir Starmer.

But even if the violence has subsided, for now, at least, the shocking scenes of disorder have underscored the scale of the task facing his government.

That, analysts say, includes defusing tensions stoked successfully by far-right groups — over immigration and fraying public services — particularly in areas of Britain that have long been in economic decline.

While opinion polls show the public clearly supports Mr. Starmer’s crackdown on violent protesters, “a lot of those people who see the rioters as thugs want immigration brought down,” said Steven Fielding, an emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham.

Mr. Starmer, who has promised to cut migration numbers, “needs to follow up and do the things he says he’s going to do,” Professor Fielding added, while noting that it was “no accident” that violence erupted in several economically deprived regions.

Concern over immigration, which declined in Britain after Brexit, is on the rise again and, when jobs are scarce and health care and other services are overstretched, immigrants make an easy target for the far right. The campaign leading up to last month’s general election prompted a bitter political dispute over the last government’s plans to send to Rwanda people arriving in Britain on small boats.

But while around 30,000 people entered the country that way last year, that was only a fraction of those admitted legally minus those who left — a number that hit almost 750,000 in 2022.

Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research institute, said Mr. Starmer must show he can revive neglected areas where the rightists have found support by bolstering employment and public services.

“He needs to deliver,” Mr. Katwala said, “for those town and cities — whether it’s Southport or Hartlepool — where people’s primary concerns are National Health Service waiting lists and ‘Can I get a job?’”

Those close to Mr. Starmer say he is getting a grip on the disorder, drawing on his experience as a chief prosecutor in 2011, when riots took place in London and he pushed to get those responsible tried, sentenced and jailed swiftly to deter others.

“He has a detailed knowledge of how to do this, and he understands how you prosecute and convict quickly, and you do so visibly in a way that sends a message to anybody who is thinking about participating in one of these riots,” said Claire Ainsley, a former policy director for Mr. Starmer.

But ensuring that such violence does not recur is harder, she said.

“We have had the far right with us in good economic times and in bad economic times,” said Ms. Ainsley, who now works in Britain for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based research institute.

“But it is much harder for them to have any kind of influence when you are in better economic times,” she added. “That means people’s living standards rising and people starting to feel they are better off and that they are part of a system that is working — and that isn’t a description of Britain today.”

Ms. Ainsley pointed to the role of social media in spreading misinformation and stoking tensions, and cautioned against making a direct link between the riots and immigration. She noted that, alongside extremists, some of the rioters may be looters and other opportunists.

It is, she added, “wrong to assume that all of the people participating in these riots are politically motivated by immigration.”

Still, other analysts note the context of the riots, after years of broken promises to reduce immigration and the contentious dispute over the last government’s doomed effort to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda.

They were a particular target of the recent anti-immigrant riots, including in Rotherham, England, where a hotel housing some asylum seekers was attacked on Aug. 4, driving home the severity of the disorder.

Launched by a former prime minister, Boris Johnson, in 2022, the Rwanda plan was adopted as a flagship policy by Rishi Sunak, who entered Downing Street later that year. The courts ruled against the proposal, and despite months of political maneuvering, no asylum seekers were sent to Africa under the plan. After taking office, Mr. Starmer quickly scrapped the effort.

But Mr. Katwala said that by pledging to “stop the boats,” Mr. Sunak had drawn attention to the issue, sending “very loud messages” about how much control he would exert over national borders while delivering none. The result, Mr. Katwala said, was to “stoke up the level of concern over the issue, and completely fail on all fronts.”

By global standards the scale of small-boat arrivals is relatively modest and “the visible lack of control is much more the issue than the number of people coming via that route,” Mr. Katwala said.

While Mr. Starmer can try to lower the political temperature, his practical options for curbing English Channel crossings are limited. He plans to crack down on people-smuggling gangs, but, unless Britain strikes a new migration deal with France, recent experience suggests that step alone is unlikely to resolve the problem.

One thing the government intends to do is to speed up the system for processing asylum requests to cut the number of would-be refugees accommodated in hotels at public expense — a source of grievance to anti-immigrant protesters. (Asylum seekers tend to be accommodated in less wealthy areas where hotel costs are lower, making them a particular target in the recent riots.)

The fact that many more people have been allowed to enter the country legally has created another issue that has been weaponized by the far right, presenting Mr. Starmer with another big challenge.

Successive Conservative governments promised but failed to reduce annual legal net immigration to below 100,000, and control of the country’s frontiers was a key issue in a 2016 referendum in which Britons voted for Brexit.

Still, since Brexit, legal immigration has tripled, falling back only slightly from its 2022 peak — the highest on record.

Those figures were inflated by programs to accommodate people from Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan, for which there was wide public support. But Britain also relies heavily on foreign workers to fill jobs in health care and other sectors, and immigration is a driver of economic growth, so cutting it is hard.

“There is broad support for all the immigration that generates the very high numbers,” said Mr. Katwala, noting that most people welcomed Ukrainians and are happy for foreign workers to fill vacancies in British hospitals, “but then concern about the scale of the number.”

Before losing last month’s general election, Mr. Sunak tightened the migration rules, restricting the right of some legal immigrants to bring relatives to Britain. Those changes are expected to push down the numbers over the next year.

Reducing them further will be difficult without damaging health care and other key sectors, or impeding Mr. Starmer’s central objective of reviving the economy to ease Britain’s cost of living crisis. The recent unrest suggests that lifting economic growth, reviving neglected cities and investing in crumbling public services have never been more important.

The riots are “not telling this government anything it didn’t know,” Professor Fielding said. “They are just making its task more urgent.”

For travelers flying into the tiny island of Thitu, the reality of China’s territorial ambition becomes instantly clear. There they are: dozens of Chinese ships surrounding a speck of land that a few hundred Filipinos call home.

For now though, life is mostly peaceful and slow on the island. Small wooden fishing boats line a white sand beach on the eastern shore. Rough houses pieced together from plywood, scrap lumber and tarps are the main form of shelter. On a recent evening, a few people gathered near the beach to debone fish, while others waded into tide pools with fishing spears.

But the calm belies the fact that Thitu is contested land. Nearby, China has stationed a flotilla of coast guard ships and maritime militia vessels. On a neighboring reef, it has constructed a military base whose lights shimmer at night like a city. The intensifying Chinese presence has startled the Philippines, which has occupied Thitu for nearly half a century. So it is upgrading its crumbling military facilities that lie on the island’s southern end.

And it is encouraging more Filipinos to move in, betting more residents will strengthen its claim to Thitu, which it calls Pag-asa, or hope, and reduce hostilities with China.

These civilians are the only ones in the Spratly Islands — a chain of 100 or so atolls, reefs and cays in the South China Sea that may have significant oil reserves and is claimed by six countries. And they find themselves in the middle of a tense geopolitical dispute.

Marjorie Ganizo and her husband, Junie Antonio Ganizo, moved here with their eight children in November despite what they saw as the risk of a Chinese invasion.

“In the end, we had to ask ourselves: hunger or fear?” Ms. Ganizo, 36, said. “No matter where you are, if it’s your time to die, it’s your time to die.”

Tensions have flared between Beijing and Manila, which has a mutual defense treaty with the United States.

Two years ago, residents heard multiple blasts that jolted the island, and feared a war was breaking out. But the altercation — between Philippine and Chinese sailors, over falling debris from a Chinese space rocket — soon subsided.

In June, in another section of the Spratlys, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel rammed and punctured some Philippine military boats, severely injuring a soldier. Tensions have de-escalated in recent weeks, but even a small miscalculation on either side could trigger a conflict with global ramifications, as the South China Sea is a crucial waterway for international trade.

For the residents of Thitu, a stretch of roughly 90 acres of land, the Chinese blockade has narrowed their area for fishing, shrinking a key source of food.

But, for some, life is better here.

Mr. Ganizo now earns as much as $350 a month as a welder, compared with the $80 he made in Palawan, the Philippine province roughly 300 miles away that is closest to Thitu. The Chinese mainland lies more than twice as far to the northwest.

He is one of many civilians working on Thitu’s military facilities. Caught off guard by Beijing’s buildup in the region, Manila began upgrading the island’s facilities in 2018. It now has a sheltered port, years after town officials asked for it. Its once-muddy runway, usually unusable after light rain, has been upgraded to concrete. An aircraft hangar, a control tower, military barracks, health center and school building are under construction.

All supplies on the island — rice, flour, eggs, meat, livestock and medicines — have to be ferried in from the mainland. A lot of the food is given free to civilians, part of the lure of the island. But bad weather can thwart these supply trips and cause food shortages.

Until this year, there was no doctor on the island, and pregnant women are still required to move to the mainland for their third trimester. Electricity is available for a fee from a diesel power plant, but houses have no running water.

Sometimes it takes a certain kind of desperation to move to Thitu. Emmanuel Greganda came from Luzon, the country’s main island, in 2016, he said, to escape former President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal war on drugs, which killed tens of thousands of people.

“I still wanted to live and change,” Mr. Greganda, 43, a former drug user, said while making wooden boat souvenirs outside his house. “My family and I were very scared because some of my friends were already killed.”

Like other male residents of Thitu, Mr. Greganda has been taught how to fire guns, to prepare for a Chinese incursion.

In 2021, Larry Hugo, the president of a fishermen’s group, was sailing to a sandbar near Thitu to fish when a big China Coast Guard ship blocked him, coming as close as 100 yards. Chinese ships regularly chase, shadow and drive away Filipino fishermen near Thitu and other parts of the South China Sea.

This June, a colleague and I spent five days on Thitu, after getting approval from the Philippine government. We flew in on a military plane and stayed with a family in their house facing the eastern shore, mostly eating fresh fish and other seafood. Last year, the government opened Thitu and other Philippine-occupied reefs and atolls in the Spratly Islands to tourists. Some residents have turned their houses into homestays for visitors.

More than 200 settlers, comprising about 65 families, live on the island. There are also about 150 workers brought here to upgrade the military facilities. Officials say roughly 100 soldiers, coast guard members and firefighters are stationed here.

While some experts say the presence of Filipinos in Thitu strengthens the country’s claim to the island, its mayor, Roberto del Mundo, said he was concerned about settlers freeloading.

“Many of them are abusing the generosity of the government,” said Mr. Del Mundo, a former air force soldier who was stationed on the island in the 1980s and 1990s. He recently cut the monthly food subsidy to only a few kilos of rice per person.

Still, many like Ms. Ganizo, the newcomer who was anxious about moving to the island, are happy to be here. Her children, including 13-year-old Jessa Mae, attend a school here, which now has 14 teachers catering to about 80 students. While some teachers are concerned that they don’t have the resources to prepare children adequately, others are thankful for jobs.

One recent evening, residents sang their hearts out on a karaoke machine, played billiards or basketball and drank alcohol. Many teenagers, glued to their smartphones watching TikTok and Facebook videos, hung out near the school for the free Wi-Fi.

Mr. Hugo, the fishermen’s group leader, moved to the island in 2011. He said the pace of life was perfect. “This is my home,” he said. “I’ll leave this island only when I’m dead.”

Russian forces, even as they scramble to respond to a surprise incursion from northern Ukraine into Russia last week, are pummeling Ukrainian forces along the front lines in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian military officials said Monday.

“Our guys do not feel any relief,” said Artem Dzhepko, a press officer with Ukraine’s National Police Brigade, which is fighting near the strategically important town of Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

He said Russian forces were continuing to use aerial bombs, as many as 10 a day, against Ukrainian positions. Mr. Dzhepko added: “It’s hard. Unfortunately, the pressure of the Russians did not decrease.”

At the same time, Ukrainian troops have been pushing to the northwest and west in Russian territory, according to a briefing Sunday from the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank.

Several thousand Ukrainian troops crossed into Russia on Aug. 6, a new front in the third year of the war and the first time the Ukrainian army has made such an extensive foray into Russia, military analysts say.

Instead of pulling brigades from the front lines in eastern Ukraine to help stop the incursion into Kursk, the region along Russia’s southwest border with Ukraine, Russia appeared to be redeploying lower-level units to the Kursk region, according to the Institute for the Study of War’s briefing.

The analysis described the Russian force as “hastily assembled” and “ill-prepared” to set up the kind of command structures needed to coordinate a military response.

The incursion into Russia marked a significant shift in the war’s narrative.

Since launching their full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russian troops have captured more than 18 percent of Ukraine. A Ukrainian counteroffensive last year failed, and this year, the war has been mainly a slog in the country’s east, with Russian troops grinding forward, largely in the Donetsk region, sometimes a few feet at a time. Ukrainian morale has sank, and pressure has built on Ukrainian leaders to negotiate a deal.

The incursion into Russian territory, far from the front line, was kept so secret that some Ukrainian soldiers and U.S. officials have said they did not know about it in advance.

Since then, Ukraine has said that the offensive aims to pull Russian troops from the east and ease pressure on Ukrainian troops along the front lines. In addition, if the Ukrainians hold on to any Russian territory, that could be used as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with Russia.

So far, Ukrainian forces have captured about 100 square miles of Russian territory and taken dozens of Russian prisoners, according to military analysts and Ukrainian reports. Russian authorities say they have evacuated more than 76,000 people from villages and towns in Kursk. On Monday, the governor of the neighboring region of Belgorod announced that residents from one of its districts bordering Ukraine also needed to leave.

So far, Moscow has not moved troops that are currently fighting in the east of the country, keeping up the pressure on Ukraine, military analysts say.

On Facebook, the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported late Sunday that the Russian army attempted four times to break through Ukrainian defenses along the front line at Toretsk, near the towns of Zalizne, Druzhba and Niu-York. Two attacks were repelled; two were ongoing.

On Monday morning, the attacks near Toretsk continued, said Yevhen Strokan, a senior lieutenant and commander of a combat drone platoon in the 206th Territorial Defense Battalion.

“I don’t feel a decrease in intensity,” Mr. Strokan said. “Everything is being assaulted in the same way.”

He said that the Kursk offensive may need more time to draw Russian troops away.

Hundreds of firefighters in Greece were battling a major wildfire on Monday that broke out near Athens a day earlier and has raced through parched forest, destroying properties and prompting evacuation orders, according to the authorities.

The fire started on Sunday afternoon in Varnavas, a town less than 30 miles north of Athens by road, and spread rapidly within minutes because of high winds, Greece’s national fire service said. In some places, the flames were more than 80 feet tall. A spokesman for the fire service, Vassilios Vathrakogiannis, said that despite “superhuman efforts” to contain the fire overnight, it had spread “like lightning.”

The “extremely dangerous” fire was still burning Monday on two major fronts, according to Greece’s civil protection minister, Vassilis Kikilias: in Grammatiko, northeast of Athens, and Kallitechnoupoli, to the east of Athens. He added that strong winds and a protracted drought had created “dramatic conditions” for the more than 600 firefighters working to douse the flames.

The blaze is one of the worst to threaten Athens, the capital, this year in what has been a busy fire season for the country, in part because of a dry winter and an exceptionally hot summer.

Greece’s civil protection authority placed several areas, including Athens, at “extreme fire risk” — the highest level of risk in the country’s five-tier system — for Monday.

Fire reached Vrilissia, an affluent suburb north of Athens. Television footage showed thick smoke there and at least one person spraying water from the roof of a house in an attempt to extinguish the flames.

Greece appealed to European partners for help and is expecting aircraft from France and Italy, as well as 75 firefighters and 25 vehicles from the Czech Republic, the Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Ministry said in a statement.

The authorities have ordered at least a dozen communities to evacuate, and television footage on Sunday showed motorists fleeing as flames lined the road near Varnavas. A children’s hospital, a military hospital and two monasteries were also evacuated. Greece’s Olympic sports complex, north of Athens, was opened overnight to house residents who had to abandon their homes.

There were no reports of casualties, though at least one firefighter experienced burns and several people were given first aid for breathing problems, a spokesman for the fire service said.

The full extent of the damage to forestland and homes was not immediately clear.

Two people were stabbed in London’s Leicester Square, a tourist hot spot, on Monday, the police said.

The victims, an 11-year-old girl and a 34-year-old woman, were taken to a hospital, Westminster police said in a post on social media. In a later update, the police said that the girl would require hospital treatment but that her injuries were not life threatening and that the woman suffered more minor injuries.

The police added that “there is no suggestion that the incident is terror-related.”

A man was arrested and was in custody, and the police said they did not believe there were any additional suspects.

The episode came exactly two weeks after a deadly knife attack in Southport, near Liverpool, that led to the death of three young girls and injured eight other children and two adults. In the days after the stabbings in Southport, false information about the identity of the attacker, including that he was an undocumented migrant, spread rapidly online and ignited a series of violent riots around Britain.

In Leicester Square, an area in front of a shop called TWG Tea was cordoned off by blue and white police tape at 1:30 p.m., with a handful of police officers positioned at the scene. There were visible blood stains and a discarded baseball cap in the cordoned-off zone.

A man working as security in the tea shop said he had witnessed the attack and intervened after a young girl and a woman he believed to be her mother were injured. Police officers then whisked the witness away for further questioning.

The BBC identified the employee as a 29-year-old named Abdullah. He told the BBC and the Press Association news agency that he had tackled the attacker, kicking the knife away before he and a few others held the man down until the police arrived.

Two hours after the attack, hundreds of tourists continued to mill about the square. Shoppers at the Lego and M&M’s stores, which both frequently have long lines of people waiting to enter, craned their necks to see what was happening as a helicopter circled overhead.

In a forest in western Ukraine, a few dozen young men and women stood at attention in two lines in the fading evening light. Some had fake guns slung over their shoulders.

Among them was Olesya Vdovych, who had spent the day with other members of the scouting organization Plast, hauling logs, running drills and learning about first aid as part of a two-week camp last August.

“I’m eager to be prepared,” Ms. Vdovych said at the time, her long blond hair tied in two braids under a forest green cap. With a number of her friends and family fighting in the war against Russia, she said she felt it was important to be ready for any situation.

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In Riomaggiore, one of the five vertigo-inducing villages that make up Cinque Terre, which hug the steep cliffs of Italy’s northwestern coast, just about everyone has a memory of the Via dell’Amore, or Love’s Lane.

With breathtaking sunset views, the seacoast trail to neighboring Manarola was popular with local couples. “Otherwise what kind of love lane would it be?” said Marinella Cigliano, a 60-something who remembers getting caught by her mother while making out with a long-ago boyfriend.

As young mothers, “we brought our children in strollers, a place for afternoon walks,” said Roberta Pecunia, whose grandfather Brizio was among the local villagers who in the 1930s carved the path out of the rock face to link the towns. And when Vittoria Capellini’s father was a young boy, walking the trail to school, his mother would tell him to “run like crazy” over the sections of the trail where the cliff face was particularly unstable.

Eventually, a rockslide did occur, in 2012, closing the trail, to the dismay of trekkers from around the world and the frustration of locals, now cut off from convenient access to services, schools and shops, not to mention relatives and friends. The only alternatives were oft-crowded trains, ferries or a sweat-inducing path up in the hills. “For us, it was a tragedy,” said Ms. Cigliano, who runs a luggage deposit near the Riomaggiore train station.

The trail reopened to tourists this month after a 24 million euro makeover — about $26 million — designed to secure the cliffs from repeat accidents, even as local officials have been pondering the effect that the reopening will have on an area whose popularity has risen stratospherically in recent years.

“The kind of tourism that leads people to seeing the Cinque Terre as a sort of Disneyland,” said Massimo Giacchetta, the regional president of a small-business association.

When the Via dell’Amore closed 12 years ago, the area had been attracting some 870,000 visitors a year. Last year some four million people passed through. The local population numbers around 4,000. You do the math.

The tourist boom has already upended life for many residents, crowding them out of public spaces, raising housing and food prices, and subbing out stores that catered to basic needs, like butchers or fishmongers, with restaurants and fried fish shops.

“They eat, and eat, and eat,” said Paola Villa, a retired Riomaggiore homeowner.

One local who commutes every day said trains were practically never on schedule because of the time it took to allow tourists to get off and on at each of the five villages, where guards keep mindful watch over crowded — often perilously so — platforms.

Even the trails linking some of the other Cinque Terre villages have been snarled by pedestrian traffic jams, forcing local officials to enforce one-ways on the most congested days “to ensure that accidents don’t happen,” said Alessandro Bacchioni of the Club Alpino Italiano, a national hiker’s association often called on by the local authorities to assist with people management.

Compared with other popular areas that struggle with overtourism, like Amsterdam, Barcelona or Iceland, the minute size of the Cinque Terre villages means that the effect is felt more strongly.

In Italy, tourist towns charge an overnight tax for visitors to help offset the costs of the daily wear and tear. But in Cinque Terre, only a fraction of the visitors actually sleep in one of the villages, so the €2-per-night tax is a drop in the bucket, said Fabrizia Pecunia, the mayor of both Riomaggiore and Manarola.

This year, Venice became the first city to experiment with an entrance fee for day-trippers, the results of which are still unclear. Ms. Pecunia said she had asked the national government to greenlight a similar entrance fee “many times,” to no avail.

So, somewhat counterintuitively, local officials are hoping that the reopening of the Via dell’Amore will be an opportunity to get people to take less beaten paths, especially those in the hills, far from the water.

“We want people to visit the park with their shoulders to the sea,” said Patrizio Scarpellini, the director of the Cinque Terre National Park. He pointed out that the Via dell’Amore made up only about 1,000 yards of 75 miles’ worth of trails in the park, which is a UNESCO world heritage site.

“The Via dell’Amore is the symbol of the Cinque Terre throughout the world,” but the area’s culture and history offer much more to explore, the mayor said.

Donatella Bianchi, the president of the park, said she hoped the focus on the Via dell’Amore would draw out “what got a little bit lost,” recovering the narrative of perseverance and backbreaking labor of generations to mold nature to human needs. (Nature does not always comply, as a succession of coastal storms, downpours, mudslides and rockslides like the one that closed the path can attest.)

In Riomaggiore, one can still come across people who farmed high in the hills, growing grapes and primary crops, on the terraced lots that define the area’s landscape and contribute to its unique beauty.

“My uncle could carry three, while my cousin and I would carry one,” said Carlo Passeri, a retired traffic police officer, recalling the harvests of his youth, heaving grapes down the hills in broad baskets.

“Because there was poverty,” he said, “all the fields were cultivated — it was so beautiful.” Now, he added, “No one wants to work the fields.”

Instead, “people rent out rooms, even the budelli,” a local term for cellars, said Mr. Passeri, who was born in Riomaggiore. “So everyone’s happy because they’re all making money.”

The mayor estimated that today, some 90 percent of the population lived off tourist-related activities, including short-term rentals.

The shift from traditional agriculture in the hills to tourism in town has meant that most of the farms terraced with the typical dry-stone walls have been abandoned.

Mr. Scarpellini said that at the beginning of the 20th century, there were around 2,000 terraced plots; now there are just over 100. “We have to get people back to places where there is culture, identity and wealth, and preserve this landscape, which is a world heritage site,” he said.

Neglect of the terracing led to other disasters in the past, including landslides in 2011 that badly damaged some of the villages. Efforts to revive the terracing tradition have been limited.

During the high season, access to the Via dell’Amore will be regulated, require a reservation and be limited to 400 people an hour, at a cost €10, or nearly the same in dollars.

Part of the money from the tickets to the path will pay for maintenance, which will be constant, said Ms. Capellini, the deputy mayor of Riomaggiore, pointing to a restored part of the trail that her father once had to run through as she strolled among newly planted shrubs, benches where lovers can canoodle (allowed) and fading graffiti pledging eternal love scrawled into the cliff walls (not allowed).

“People can come here to take a selfie — we all do it,” Ms. Capellini said. But she hoped the reopening of the Via dell’Amore would entice visitors to learn about the culture and history of Cinque Terre. “It’s our story,” she said.