Portofino — Innamo

Portofino is not really trying to impress you. It has been beautiful for a very long time and the people here are used to it. The harbour, the pastel houses, the promontory that curves out into the Ligurian Sea: it is genuinely as lovely as it looks in the photographs, which is not always the case with famous places. Two hundred permanent residents. The simplest things are the best ones.

When to go

May to June. Or September, when the yachts have gone.

Early summer is Portofino at its best: the Mediterranean flowers still on the hillsides, the sea a clear and cold blue, the village not yet at full capacity. The yachts arrive in July and August and the harbour becomes a very different kind of place: still beautiful, considerably louder.

September and October are the local recommendation. The boats leave, the restaurants relax, and the hills above the village go gold and rust with chestnut trees. In October, the light on the water in the late afternoon is something photographers come from far away to catch.

The Village

Walk to the lighthouse. Take the boat to San Fruttuoso.

The village is tiny: one harbour, a handful of streets, more restaurants than are strictly necessary. Walk up to the lighthouse on the point for the view back across the gulf toward the Cinque Terre on clear days. Swim from the rocks below. Return for aperitivo as the light changes.

The boat to San Fruttuoso is worth the trip. The abbey, founded in the eleventh century, sits at the back of a bay otherwise accessible only by sea or a long hike through the hills. On the seabed offshore, a bronze Christ stands with arms extended, put there in 1954 as a protector of divers and sailors. The bay is one of the most beautiful in Liguria, and almost nobody knows it.

Where to Stay

Santa Margherita Ligure: five minutes by boat, and a proper Italian town.

Portofino’s hotels are few and not inexpensive. Santa Margherita Ligure, a short boat ride along the coast, is a proper Italian resort town with a wider range of accommodation and more of the genuine local life. Rapallo is another option, slightly further, slightly quieter. Nesse will match you to the right base depending on what you want from the trip.

For those for whom cost is not a consideration: the Splendido is a grand old villa hotel above the village, with a pool and a view that have been impressing people since 1901. It is not modest, and it delivers entirely on the promise.

Food & Drink

Trofie al pesto, focaccia, and farinata from a wood-fired oven.

The Ligurian kitchen is not the kitchen of the south. It is the food of a fishing coast and a mountainous hinterland: pesto made with fresh basil grown in sea air, focaccia from a bakery in Santa Margherita at eight in the morning, farinata (a thin chickpea flatbread cooked in a very hot oven) from the forno in the next street.

Trofie al pesto is the defining dish: a short twisted pasta with a sauce that here, at source, with the right basil, at the right season, is something quite specific. Eat it once properly and the supermarket version will never quite do again.