Though I meant to shelter there only one night, I stayed for three. A curious lost time in which, when I wasn’t gorging on trofie al pesto — a dish resembling worms ensnared in slime but tasting comfortingly of pine forests and pecorino — I was exploring the coast, first driving north to Rapallo, where Sibelius dreamt of Finnish nationalism and wrote his Second Symphony, and where Nietzsche and Ezra Pound both resided for a while before succumbing to insanity, then south around the bay to Portofino, an exquisitely diminutive playground of designer boutiques and jetset bars, bizarrely out of place, as though a corner of Milan had rolled down a mountain and landed at the water’s edge.
Thereafter, for all my efforts, I never succeeded in finding the Ligurian coast again: either I misread the maps, or those I was travelling with were in a hurry to be home, or the place had simply never existed outside my imagination.
Now here I am, returned to Liguria at last, sitting on the terrace of the Hotel Splendido, as tranquil as any of the hermits who once lived hereabouts, enjoying looking down through the cypresses and umbrella pines at the Portofino I thought I had invented — a sanctuary of peace from this high up, but, once you get down into it, alive with the parade of late-summer visitors, not all of them impossibly glamorous, though those, alas, are the ones you notice. It’s the urban yachting chic that marks them out: the men in red linen deck trousers, the women — invariably looking 10 years younger than their daughters — not certain whether their glitter heels are quite right for the cobblestones, but convinced a little pink fur around their cuffs and collars will protect them from the sea breezes.
I have a weakness for grand hillside hotels that were once buildings belonging to religious orders. I enjoy feeling sybaritic and monastic all at once. The Splendido’s terraces are calmly lovely, the views serene rather than awe-inspiring. You think about other human beings here as much as God — the sweet accommodations man has made with nature — and, of course, you think about your own well-being, which is to say the hotel thinks about it for you. Thus the service is considerate, the wine and olives and macadamia nuts delicious, and if the food is a little less so, that just enforces the monastic feel.
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You are not here only to have a good time. No experienced traveller expects a grand hotel to succeed when it tries grand cuisine anyway. For which blame the very concept of grand cuisine. In fact — again as might have been the case in monasteries and convents — the Splendido works best when it is least stuffy.
Come that dead hour after dinner, when time can hang heavy in a hotel like this, Vladi Gatto glides from the terrace piano to the bar piano and puts on a show the like of which even the most confirmed seeker after pleasure will not have encountered. A man of a hundred languages and a thousand songs, Signor Gatto not only demonstrates a remarkable musical repertoire — from the Beatles and the Stylistics to Charles Aznavour and Andrea Bocelli — but succeeds in persuading an elegant and sometimes world-weary clientele onto the dance floor to dance dances they didn’t know they knew.
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Do not mistake me: nobody is dragooned into being more festive than they wish to be; you can sit unnoticed in a cushioned corner with your grappa if that’s your preference. But the conviviality is infectious. And by the time Antonio, the otherwise austere head barman, has sung one of his duets with Vladi Gatto — one night it might be Time to Say Goodbye, the next George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord — everyone has found a song they want to sing.
Thus can a hotel entertainer of genius overcome the reserve of even the most aloofly beautiful of beautiful people.
It can, though, especially if the weather fails you, all get a little bit claustrophobic. Those you danced with the evening previously, you might not want to find yourself sitting next to at a Portofino restaurant the evening after.
To break the cycle of sophisticated sameness I take a bus out and find myself, more by luck than judgment, across the mountain in Recco, a small, modern town (the old one took a battering in the second world war) well known for its foccacia, its saint’s day — Nostra Signora del Suffragio — and the fireworks that accompany it — the Sagra del Fuoco.
Saints’ days come and go in Italy, as do firework festivals, but there is an atmosphere of sinister anticipation in the town when I arrive that cannot, to my sense, be explained by the holiday market, or the religious procession, which is still hours away, or by the fireworks, which are not scheduled until the late evening. Though the church is full of celebrants, I do manage to get a quick look at Our Lady del Suffragio through the zoom lens of my camera: truly a bling Madonna, her neck and wrists festooned with offerings of gold chains and bracelets, the gaudiness of her in perfect accord with the church itself, which, like all the churches of Liguria, is an extravaganza of ornamentation, every inch of ceiling painted, every pillar and pilaster gilded, the whole lit like a theatre by crystal chandeliers.
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Back on the streets, crowds are gathering. Nothing happening until evening, a policeman says, but I have seen men laying gunpowder trails in the river bed, and in car parks, and on football fields, and little by little, through the rain and my bad Italian, it dawns on me that the town is divided into warring districts and that, quite apart from the firework display, these districts are competing in some explosive spectacular. Suddenly there is a bang, and then another, and then what sounds like a naval bombardment. The people who have gathered to watch are now covering their ears and taking refuge behind walls or cars. In the river bed, men in camouflage pants and with piratical scarves tied around their heads, their faces blackened like military mining engineers of old, are putting long torches to what I take to be mortars filled with powder. Seconds later the bombardment begins again, the mortars exploding one by one until a delta-shaped cluster of them go off together and it is a wonder all the chandeliers in the Santuario del Suffragio are not blown out.
Even before the smoke has cleared and the partisan applause died down, we are off to another part of town to see what the next district can do. This time the bombardment is aerial, the sky torn apart with flames and burst shells, the noise so deafening that foccacia in a nearby restaurant is the only escape. How much of this there is going to be, I don’t stay to find out. Some things you just have to accept as foreign. And a bling Madonna with her baby in her arms, commemorated by a day of violent explosions, each more frightening than the last, is one of them.
The ancient port of Camogli is no more than a few miles down the coast — a pleasant perambulating town, rather Cornish in feel, if you can imagine Cornish fishermen’s cottages replaced by five-storey dwellings painted to look like palazzi. Nobody is quite sure whether Camogli means massed houses or house of wives, the second interpretation pointing to the loneliness of the women here, waiting for the men to return from the sea. Either way, huddling from the unforgiving elements, and the no less unforgiving explosions coming from Recco, the spirit of this place is harsh.
Back in Santa Margherita, I realise that the Liguria I originally fell for was the more clement, soft-living Liguria, a region you come to promenade in if you are beautiful, or, if you are an artist/philosopher like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, to walk the hills in solitude before madness claims you. That settled, I re-accommodate myself to the pamperings of Portofino. It’s lovely in the evenings, sitting in the Piazzetta, eating snapper baked the Ligurian way in white wine and olive oil and a few Taggia olives, and pausing, between mouthfuls, to marvel at the gaudiness of your fellow human beings.
Clip-clop on the cobblestones they go, the men in newsprint pants, the women strapped into handbags almost as complicated as the rigging on the pleasure yachts they have probably not stepped off. But only raise your eyes from the human show, and there on the hillside, overtopping the sad cypresses, is the church of San Giorgio, glowing yellow in the moonlight, its spectacular cemetery not quite visible except to the mind’s eye, the dead of Portofino commemorated in oval photographs and lying on marble shelves, one above the other, integral to the place for ever. And higher up still, Castello Brown — named after the British consul in Genoa, Montague Yeats Brown, who bought and modernised the old castle nearly 150 years ago — uncannily shiplike in its floodlights, a great vessel floating above Portofino, for all the world as though it is Noah’s Ark, come to rest at last upon the dry summit of Mount Ararat, in anticipation of God’s giving humanity a second chance.
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What I can’t decide is whether this centre of Italian worldliness — loving all the good things in life, the more expensive the better — is proof that we deserved that second chance, or that we blew it centuries ago.
Howard Jacobson was a guest of Orient-Express Hotels
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Getting there: fly to Genoa, 25 miles from Portofino, with Ryanair (www.ryanair.com). Alternatively, Pisa, Florence, Milan and Turin are 90-125 miles away from Portofino, and served by British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com), EasyJet (www.easyjet.com), Ryanair (www.ryanair.com), Meridiana (0845 355 5588, www.meridiana.it) and Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com).
Where to stay: the Hotel Splendido (www.hotelsplendido.com) has B&B doubles from £488, if booked through Orient-Express Hotels (0845 077 2222). If you’re on a budget, the cheapest rooms in town are at the Hotel Eden (00 39 018 526 9091, www.hoteledenportofino.com; B&B doubles from £123).
Tour operators: try Seasons in Style (01244 202000, www.seasonsinstyle.co.uk), or Harlequin (01708 850333, www.harlequinholidays.com).