Portofino

Where it sits. Portofino occupies a hooked inlet on the south-eastern tip of a limestone promontory that pushes three kilometres into the Ligurian Sea between Santa Margherita Ligure and the Golfo del Tigullio, about thirty-six kilometres east of Genoa. The headland shelters the bay from every direction except due south, which is why a natural harbour barely 200 metres across became a refuge for Roman shipping — Pliny the Elder recorded it as Portus Delphini, the dolphins' port. The village that grew around it has fewer than four hundred permanent residents and occupies almost no flat ground: the houses stand in a single tight curve around the water, backed immediately by wooded slopes of holm oak and pine that rise to Monte di Portofino at 610 metres.

Colour and the painted façades. The image everyone carries of Portofino — the wall of ochre, apricot, terracotta and dusty pink houses reflected in the harbour — depends on a Ligurian trick worth knowing about. Much of what looks like architecture is paint. The window surrounds, the quoins at the corners, the cornices, the shutters and in some cases entire windows are trompe-l'œil, applied to flat plaster by specialist painters. The technique spread along this coast from the seventeenth century because dressed stone had to be shipped in and paint did not, and it is still maintained under strict local rules governing the permitted pigments. Look closely at the buildings on the north side of the Piazzetta and you can see where a painted shutter sits beside a real one.

On screen. Portofino's best-known film credit is Enchanted April (1991), Mike Newell's adaptation of Elizabeth von Arnim's 1922 novel about four English women who rent an Italian castle for a month to escape a grey London spring. The castle of the film is Castello Brown, the fort on the bluff above the harbour, and both its terraces and the village below appear throughout. The circle closes neatly: von Arnim wrote the novel after staying at a castle on this coast in 1921, and the production came back to the same rock seventy years later. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards. Portofino also drew the mid-century Hollywood colony that settled along this coast — Rex Harrison kept a villa above the village for decades, and Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart and Elizabeth Taylor were all photographed on the Piazzetta during the years when American productions were shooting in Italy to spend blocked lire. That paparazzi economy, more than any single film, is what turned a fishing village into shorthand for Mediterranean glamour.

What you actually see today. The Piazzetta is the whole village in one space: a small rectangle of cafés on three sides, boats moored on the fourth, and a single lane, Via Roma, running inland. From the far corner a stepped path climbs past the church of San Giorgio, rebuilt after Allied bombing in 1944 and holding relics said to be those of Saint George brought back by crusaders, to Castello Brown. The castle was a Genoese fort, the Castello di San Giorgio, until 1867, when the British consul in Genoa, Montague Yeats-Brown, bought it and turned it into a house; he planted the two pines that still frame the terrace to mark his marriage. The comune bought it in 1961 and it is now open as a small museum with the best view in Liguria — the harbour mouth directly below and the Tigullio gulf beyond. Fifteen minutes further along a paved path is the Faro di Portofino, a working lighthouse at Punta del Capo where the path ends at the sea.

Beyond the harbour. The whole promontory is a regional park with a marine protected area attached, and the walking is the reason to stay more than an afternoon. The classic route runs west over the ridge to the Abbazia di San Fruttuoso, a tenth-century Benedictine abbey standing directly on a pebble cove that has no road at all — roughly two hours on a rough, sometimes exposed path, or fifteen minutes by boat. In the bay in front of it, at seventeen metres, stands the bronze Cristo degli Abissi, placed in 1954 and one of the most-dived statues in the Mediterranean.

Getting there and timing. There is no station at Portofino. Trains run to Santa Margherita Ligure, from where bus 782 covers the last five kilometres of narrow corniche in about fifteen minutes, or ferries run from Santa Margherita, Rapallo and Camogli. Driving is a bad idea: the road is single-track in places and parking in the village is among the most expensive in Italy, with rates quoted by the hour. Day boats disgorge crowds between eleven and four; the village empties in the evening and the Piazzetta at eight, with the lights coming on around the water, is the version worth waiting for.