Portofino

Portofino is a fishing village that became a byword for the Riviera without losing its shape. A tight horseshoe of tall, narrow houses painted ochre, rose, saffron and terracotta wraps around a small natural harbour at the tip of the Portofino promontory, with wooded slopes rising steeply behind. The houses line the quay in the Genoese manner, with arcades at ground level, and they close around the Piazzetta - "a Ciassetta" in Ligurian - the little square at the water's edge that is the whole village's living room. Seen from the hill above, with boats in the basin and the pines on the headland, it looks almost too composed to be real.

The harbour has been known since antiquity: Pliny the Elder referred to it as Portus Delphini, the port of the dolphin. A document of 986 records it as a possession of the abbey of San Fruttuoso, on the other side of the promontory, and from the 13th century it belonged to the Republic of Genoa. Its strategic value shows in Castello Brown, the fortress above the harbour, built on earlier fortifications, enlarged in 1557 and for centuries one of Genoa's key coastal strongholds. After it was disarmed in 1867, the British consul Montague Yeats-Brown bought it in 1870 and turned it into a villa, planting the pines on its terrace that are still visible from the harbour; the town acquired it in 1961. The views from its walls, straight down onto the harbour and out along the coast, are the finest in Portofino.

Above the village stands the church of San Giorgio, dedicated to the patron saint and rebuilt in its 18th-century form after wartime bombing; it keeps relics venerated by the town. Out on the headland stands the lighthouse of Punta Portofino, built in 1917. From the late 19th century the village drew wealthy visitors, and by the middle of the 20th century tourism had overtaken fishing as its livelihood.

The whole municipality lies within the Portofino regional nature park, which protects the promontory's Mediterranean woods and, offshore, seagrass meadows and coral. Offshore, the Christ of the Abyss statue by Guido Galletti has stood on the seabed at 17 m since 1954, in memory of the diver Dario Gonzatti.

Getting there

Portofino is about 5 km from Rapallo and about 32 km from Genoa Cristoforo Colombo Airport (GOA). The nearest railway station is Santa Margherita Ligure-Portofino on the Genoa-Pisa line, from which local buses run daily to the village along the coast road. Boats also sail from Rapallo, calling at Santa Margherita Ligure on the way.