Postcard from Portofino

A century ago, people were smarter. Royals from cold climes headed for the Italian Riviera to winter—in places with palms, palace-hotels and yacht clubs. Places like Portofino. (No one would’ve been caught dead hiking and sweating on the roller-coaster trail between the villages of the Cinque Terre)..
Though Alison and I live in Paris we always spend part of the year—usually winter—on the Riviera. Childhood attachments and more. We hit Liguria for sun (Alison enjoys it) and solitude (because people are silly these days, and instead of going to the Riviera they go skiing and get cold and wet and eat badly, meaning anyone who has any sense can have the Riviera to himself).
We like the low-season emptiness. We have our rituals. One of them is hiking out to Portofino—a dangerous proposition in summer, when the traffic is nightmarish.
Today we rolled into Portofino and had the Castello Brown—the hilltop fortress-mansion where Enchanted April was filmed—to ourselves, as usual. There were no lines at the Armani boutique—not that either of us wanted to shop. Shop for designer clothes in Portofino? Why?
There was no wait for focaccia at the bakery (ok, it’s not the best focaccia in the region, but it’s still good). The bakery is just about the only “normal” store on the slate-paved street that slopes from the parking lot to the horseshoe-shaped harbor where the last surviving pair of fishing boats bob between the yatchs of billionaires.
After scrambling around the requisite pine trees and black-and-white-striped churches of stone, we were happy to find a new “boardwalk” on level ground. The walkway is built of cement and stone, not boards, but what the hell. It runs between the tiny village of Paraggi, hunkered down in a hairpin curve, and Santa Margherita Ligure.
Parts of the walkway are suspended from the seawall and segue what’s got to be one of Italy’s more gorgeous shoreline roads, a terrifying feat of engineering. It used to be suicidal—above I wrote “nightmarish”—for pedestrians to walk out here. We figure one too many wound up as road kill, and that must have affected tourism revenues, so finally the local authorities did something.
We do this walk every year, either in December or January. Now we can stroll side-by-side as we go, and be practically alone, holding hands. Unmolested by cars we gazed at the hills studded with the villas of super-rich Eurotrash, some famous or notorious—including Silvio Berlusconi, who rents the impressive faux castle near Paraggi. Happily Italy’s disastrous political mess wasn’t on our minds.