I have been on holiday on the Italian Riviera and, all week, I have been trying to share some of my experiences in these blogs. Mostly, as I confessed, I planned to have a lazy relaxing time lying on the beach and indulging in the wonderful Italian cuisine but you can’t lie around all the time when there is so much of interest around you. Here are some of the places I visited just along the coast from my base in the little seaside town of Santa Margherita Ligure. The photograph above was taken from the ferry that took me on the 15 minutes journey from what now seemed like home. It was my first site of the little town of Rapallo.

It, like Santa Margherita and Portofino, was “discovered” by Northern Europeans and North Americans during the early 20th Century when it was declared “smart.” It isn’t difficult to see why when you walk along its wide, palm tree lined promenade. For those of us who live on the South coast of England, the place is immediately recognisable as an exotic version of our own seaside resorts but with much better weather and food.

Like my home town of Lewes, it too has its own Medieval castle and the odd cannon or two – it was  so like home and yet totally different.

I wasn’t going to spend long here because the main purpose of the trip was to have a lingering if wind-swept lunch by the sea. I told you this was meant to be a lazy holiday.

Rapallo was known to me from University days as the town where the Modernist American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) lived out the second half of his life writing great but complex poetry but also, sadly, ruining his reputation and maybe his life and offending posterity with his enthusiastic defence of Mussolini’s fascism and with his increasingly racist opinions.

I engage with a lot of his work, just as I like the music of that other unpleasant genius, Richard Wagner and as I’m a bit of a culture nerd, I hoped to find the house where he lived. In my poet-obsessive way, I had been asking people ever since I arrived in Italy if they knew about his time in Rapallo but I always drew blank expressions and shrugs. No body, it seemed, had even heard of him – not even the woman in Rapallo’s largest bookshop. Maybe he is forgotten here, perhaps people want to forget him or more probably, I didn’t search deeply enough. The lunch was excellent though on that windy terrace by the sea and possibly, if I could only just let go, I knew enough about Ezra Pound already.  He had a top floor apartment on the seafront somewhere behind the palm trees so maybe that was good enough to imagine him here the next time I dig into his infamous (because ferociously difficult to read)  Cantos. Certainly here in the restaurant no one was  talking about Modernist poetry.

After lunch, Rapallo seemed to fall asleep but I took the opportunity to look around idly gazing at those top floor apartment balconies whilst telling myself to leave all this Ezra Pound stuff alone.

There was enough to see here in its own right and when I left the main streets, I was free to imagine this place at any time in the last few hundred years.

I’m sure that the town would have livened up again later but for my short visit, thanks for this  Rapallo, the town gave itself to me in siesta time and allowed me to imagine what it would have been like, sorry to go on, in Ezra Pound’s day.

After that it was time to head back to Santa Margherita Ligure for a late afternoon swim in the sea. It was often difficult summoning up the energy to leave my holiday home base but on another day I decided to visit the region’s major city, the historic capital of Liguria, Genoa, once the biggest port in Europe. It was easy enough to get there on the regular train service from Santa Margherita’s very efficient flower bedecked railway station.

I wasn’t sure what to expect after a friendly Genoan waiter that I met in Bologna once told me that I should avoid the dark alleyways of his home town, the callugi, or I would encounter prostitutes and, even worse, robbers, who would say, in that waiter’s own memorable phrase: “your money or your death.”

I wasn’t that worried when I arrived in Genoa because on a sunny day it looked magnificent against the Italian blue sky. Anyway, you don’t need to go to Genoa to find prostitutes or robbers, you can find them in Harrods.

It is a mini-Versailles, with even its own Hall of Mirrors but everything is on a smaller scale and, in all honesty, is more charming because it has very obviously seen better days and is in need of a bit of Genoan love and care.

I had already eaten too many great Italian meals on my trip to get full enjoyment out of the Hall of Mirrors but at least it acted as a oft-repeated reminder that there is a consequence to over-eating.

After the Royal Palace, I walked to the pedestrianised Via Garibaldi area where I encountered neither prostitue nor robber. I was looking for a group of palaces that have been turned into a co-joined set of art galleries known collectively as the Musei di Strada Nuova. The photograph below was taken from one of its terraces and you can see the two main buildings, the Palazzo Rosso (the Red Palace) and the Palazzo Bianco (the White Palace) – no prizes for spotting which is which.

There are also a number of works by the Genoan master Valerio Castello whom I first discovered on this holiday when I saw one of his paintings in the basilica in Santa Margherita. He and many of the other unfamiliar, to me anyway, Italian Baroque painters here in the museum were new to me but I am gradually being seduced by their particular taste for violent death and high drama. Here are some of the most memorable of them:

The picture and the painter who stays with me longest though, sorry another gloomy one, is Saint Ursula by the Spanish artist Francesco Zurbaran (1598-1664) whose work I’ve seen in books but never in the flesh as it were. This strange mix of realism and fantasy is distractingly modern, subtly surealistic, if that is possible and definitely very weird as the unfortunate saint, a lady of fashion obviously,  raises the weapon of her distruction towards her head as if in an act of suicide. I might have to plan a trip to Spain to see more of this man’s work.

Saint Ursula by Francesco Zurbaran (1598-1664)

My final trip away from Santa Margherita Ligure was to a stretch of coastland called Cinque Terre, so beautiful and remarkable that it was made a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1997 and a National Park in 1999. Some say it has the most beautiful views in Europe so as it was just about an hour away along the coast, I thought it would be churlish not to go and take a look.

It came as no surprize that this area has won so many accolades, Cinque Terre is unique. Five little villages, the cinque in Cinque Terre, were built on these remote and inaccessible rocky cliff tops in the Middle Ages when the Mediterranean Sea was a dangerous place. Liguria was part of the Genoan Empire and if it wasn’t winning in the hurly-burley of rival Italian empires, it was losing and, either way, these waters were battle fields. Humans settled here, safe in their hideaways, many centuries before the current medieval buildings were constructed painfully I suspect on terraces hand-cut from the bare rockface. The villagers were secure but life was tough.

  The villagers of Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore created a viable living by terracing the rock for agriculture relying on the cliffs to defend them from the bad guys whilst they cultivated vines, vegetables, olives and lemons.

I took the train, life is easier these days I know but spare a thought for the workers who built the railway line here in the 19th. Century. I journeyed to the furthest village, Riomaggiore with a plan to make my way back to the nearest one, Monterosso at first on foot and then by boat. It was an inspirational day.

One of my first surprizes, rather mundanely, was that life could be so, well, ordinary up in these wonderful villages even though the phrase “sea views” is an understatement.

Life goes on wherever you are and the washing still needs to be done as does the shopping…..

…even though cars are banned and there are often a lot of steps between your apartment and the local shops.

The absence of cars might be inconvenient for the residents but it gives the place its mystique for visitors tired of city life and the noise of traffic. I know there is a car in that photograph but as with all rules there are also exceptions.

Before the trains, everything was transported by sea in and out of the little harbour at the bottom of Riomaggiore’s steep descent.

You don’t need to see the sea to pick up the nautical flavour of this atmospheric row of harbour side houses.

I’m not taking a boat from here though because the first part of the journey will be on foot along the so-called Via d’Amore

It is a sensational footpath with, yes, amazing views, especially, in my case, if you don’t look down too much.

It is goodbye to Riomaggiore, I’m on my way to the next village, Manarola but first there is a walk along the cliff tops.

Luckily this is Italy and you never have to go very far before finding a restaurant or a bar and on this walk you can even find a Bar d’Amore.

A little further on a nice Italian man will even play you a love song on his guitar. This is, after all the Via d’Amore.

 Manarola is every bit as beautiful as Riomaggiore but it might have the edge in no nonsense Ligurian
practicality – I particularly liked the boats parked like cars outside their owners’ houses. I admired the waitress too in one of the restaurants who looked at her watch when I ordered tea and told me that that was fine, it was five to four in the afternoon – English tea time.

The people of Cinque Terre are practical because they have to be, things can be difficult when you live on a cliff and last winter there were major floods and landfalls around here so us visitors are often warned of the dangers by rather frightening signs.

This one was for swimmers in flip-flops and swimsuits making there way down some particularly vertiginous metal stairs.

The climb down was worth it for the cool sea breeze and the crystalline clear seawater.

Even in a tough maritime environment, Italians make sure that the sea is also their plaything.

I clambered down the rocks in a different direction on my way to the unadorned gap in the rocks where the ferry boat, I was told, would arrive in a few minutes.

I waited in patient disbelief….

…but sure enough, on schedule the ferry for Monterosso arrived to take me on the next stage of my journey.

  Manarola looked very handsome from the sea – it was the best way to fully appreciate the reality of its location.

 I was on my way to the third of the villages,  Corniglia, but is land-locked so I could only watch it from the boat. Yet again, the view from the sea illustrated the story of these isolated communities surrounded by their terraced farms.

 Next stop Vernazza….

…where everyone looked like they would spend the day swimming or at least walking round the village in their swimming costumes…

…but I had my eye on that precariously placed restaurant built, incredibly, on the side of the rock. I didn’t stop though because the boat was off again and it was time to go to the last village, Monterosso, the largest of the five where I would disembark to catch my train home.

I needn’t have rushed, in these parts, no body was in a hurry and it was very tempting to find a sun bed by the sea on the Cinque Terre’s only traditional tourist beach. After the other villages, it looked rather tame not to be swimming in rocky lagoons.

If all that walking and travelling that sounds too leisurely then here’s something a bit more arduous. You remember all that stuff about Ezra Pound in Rapallo, well here’s the man himself. No body does it quite like him so be patient with his very eccentric accent, it is worth the effort, believe me. If you have given up on Modernist poetry, and please don’t, then  before that here’s Paganini’s “Cannone” violin being played on one of its rare outing from the Genoa Museum…forgive the news reporter, if you can, for talking over the great violin whenever it’s played.

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I have just returned from my Italian holidays staying in the small Italian Riviera town of Santa Margherita Ligure that sits happily on the Mediterranean sea shore along the coast from Genoa, Italy’s largest harbour and just next door to Portofino, a small village that has turned itself into a millionaires’ haven. Santa Margherita Ligure has been an elegant seaside resort since the 19th Century but got truly “discovered” by the international “jet set” during the 1950’s when a relatively forgotten part of Europe became “the” place to be seen whether you were a hollywood star or a literary giant like Ernest Hemingway or, ssh, Ezra Pound. It was one of the principal locations for the Gina Lollobrigida and Rock Hudson movie Come September (1961) so if you ever get a chance to watch it you will get a feel for what it was like in those days.

I had come, if I’m being honest, for the sea and the sun and, of course, the food but I didn’t spend all my time on the beach drinking tea and generally idling around.

Well, as I said, I didn’t spend all my time idling around on the beach, there were plenty of other places to while away the time in a languorously unhurried way. S.M.L. is a very pretty town quietly getting on with life in spite of all us wide-eyed visitors. The climate has made Liguria one of Italy’s lushest regions where exotic flowers and palm trees mix with intoxicatingly perfumed jasmine hedgerows and where the trees are laden not just with olives but with oranges and lemons too.

Ligurians have a special way with the exteriors of their houses decorating them elegantly in a traditional “trompe d’oeil” style where detailed painting compensates, maybe economically, with the absence of elaborately carved stone-work.

Some of the buildings are masterpieces of artificial perspective.

Their houses are works of art and beguile the eye with their tricks so that sometimes you don’t quite know if those windows are real or not.

The result is a wonderful mix of colours beautifully contrasted with the blue skies and vibrant greens of the foliage.

It is a real pleasure just to stroll maybe that’s why the Ligurians make such a point of keeping their streets so attractive. After-all slowly walking and talking on a pleasant evening seems to be what Italians like best.

I always savoured the ten minute walk every morning from my accomodation down through the town to the seashore. Well it would have taken ten minutes if there wasn’t always something to distract you on route.

I liked some of the old and less glamourous buildings too like these gnarled workshops with their solid but weathered oak doors.

Even the modern apartment blocks joined in the game of colours. People, well these Italians anyway, don’t seem to mind living close to each other. You really can chat to your neighbour across the road without leaving home.

My apartment was in an area known as San Siro which had once been the agricultural village nestling in the foothills next to the fishing port of Santa Margherita but now the two are co-joined with an invisible thread.  I enjoyed the down-to-earth atmosphere in this part of town often taking the first coffee of the day in its little piazza by the church of San Siro

This is where the local people congregated whether it was for the market, for a coffee or a beer or to let the children romp with that peculiar joyfullness that is not always apparent in Northern European streets. Sometimes though it is just quiet and you can sit  with your coffee and watch the shadows lengthen over the church.

Inside the church of San Siro is another world and an unexpected one too – Italian Baroque doesn’t go in for understatements and this small farming village had its own 17th Century temple to spiritual chutzpah.

The walls are decorated with a number of paintings from the Italian Baroque often with an emphasis on the gory side of saintly martyrdom. Coming in here when it was so hot outside, I identified more with those languishing plaster angels over the arches. San Siro, or Saint Syrus of Pavia, was reputed to have been the small boy who supplied Jesus with the five loaves of bread that he used to feed the five thousand in his most hospitable of miracles. San Siro obviously had a sensible Italian respect for good food.

Coming out again into the sunshine, I see those “trompe d’oeil” house fronts anew – they are merely another form of that Italian delight in decorative design.

When I reach the little town’s main square, my eye always goes to the statue of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), a Ligurian from Genoa and one of united Italy’s founding fathers who campaigned and fought for the unification of Italy living long enough to see his dreams fulfilled and to die a national hero. The affection with which he is still remembered is somehow illustrated by those golden oranges clustering in the tree next to his memorial.

Mazzini also believed that the natural consequence of a united Italy was a united Europe so I wondered what he would make of us Europeans today with all our self-imposed economic divisions.

A short walk later and I’m in Santa Margherita’s other great gathering point, the square outside the town’s main church, the Basilica of Santa Margaretha herself or Santa Margaretha d’Antiocha (Saint Margaret of Antioch) to give her her full name who may be as fictional as the dragon that is supposed to have swallowed her but who is venerated as the patron saint of childbirth after the “miraculous” way she was regurgitated  from the dragon’s stomach.

Everyone seems to pass through this square no matter where they are going or what they are doing even if they are not interested in the regurgitation of their patron saint. The square is the site of manhy of the town’s communal events, it holds regular markets, outdoor concerts and conferences and it is a place where it just feels right to linger with friends letting the church’s grand bells mark the passage of time.

Some folk seemed immmune to the strength of the sun…

..but luckily for me there is the splendid Cafe del Borgo on the edge of the square where it is possible to sit at midday in delicious shade for the next espresso coffee of the day. Here you can people-watch, (or is it people-bitch?) and admire the view and even, if you are lucky, listen to an alfresco concert. One night I sat there until late when a youthful and dynamic brass band played operatic music by Verdi, Rossini and Puccini reminding us just where Italian opera gets its inspiration.

I too could keep my eye on the time and on the basilica sitting under the cafe’s canopy

The Basilica di Santa Margherita is, like the church of San Siro, a 17th century building in the fashionable Baroque style.

Completed in 1658, it is even less shy than San Siro…

… and inside it is even more magnificent. You will love it if you think Liberace and Lady Gaga needed lessons in exuberance but if you are just a simple Englishman on a seaside holiday, it can, at first, take your breath away.

Nothing is left unadorned and the finished work is illuminated by rows of extravagant crystal chandeliers telling us, I guess, about the glory of God.

There are many gloomily realistic 17th Century Baroque paintings in the side chapels illustrating just how rough a time some of those saints had and sparing us few of the details of their bloody martyrdoms.

I am unfamiliar with the Italian painters who followed the great Renaissance flourishing and I am still not sure how much I like many of them but this one, Saint Catherine’s Mystical Marriage by Genoan artist Valerio Castello (1624-1659) captured my imagination with its gentle depiction of the saint and the Virgin’s love for the Christchild along with the wickedly barbed knives on Saint Catherine’s infamous wheel of torture decorously displayed under her skirts.

After all that extravagance and emotion, it feels good to walk down some of the little alleyways, carrugi, that are less “in yer face” but just as contemplative in their own way.

Italy does alleyways exceptionally well. They are places for adventures with a hint of danger and mystery when we don’t quite know where we are heading.

I love that feeling so quite often I just keep walking…

…often not knowing where I’m going….

..but drawn onwards by hints of the unknown…..

until I arrive somewhere new in a burst of sunlight.

Then it’s time for an Italian beer served colder than cold when you are ready to return to the world of people.

On such an evening, I did the journey in reverse starting in the little port with its mix of fishing boats and luxury cruisers just as the sun began to fade.

I was heading up the hillside for a classical music concert in one of the town’s monumental 17th century mansions but yet again, the landscape and its buildings were inspirational enough on their own in the fading golden light.

As you climb higher there are panoramic views alternating with secretive glimpses at the ends of alleys…

…the sea is always apparent even if it is only in its reflective light…

….walking to the hill-top above the town where another Baroque building, the Villa Durazzo (1676) with its ornamental gardens and classical statuary commands the view.

It is a fine place to visit during the day when you can wander through its parkland gardens and take coffee on its terrace but in the evening light I enjoyed it even more as somehow,  I always feel a building’s history more intensely in twilight.

The Villa Durazzo now belongs to the town after centuries in aristocratic hands and it is in the process of becoming a mix between museum, function room, concert hall and, increasingly, the place for a glamourous wedding ceremony.

One of the century’s most expensive weddings was held here in 2008 when the English footballer, Wayne Rooney married Coleen McLoughlin although most of the millions of pounds spent on the event was mostly to cover the cost of several days of partying on a luxury yacht also hired for the occasion. The singer Rod Stewart also married one of his many wives here at the Villa Durazzo.

I wasn’t here for a wedding though but a music recital by the two classical guitarists Mauro Bonelli and Andrea Leveratto who played excitingly virtuosic arrangements of music by J.S.Bach, Rameau and Piazzola with just a few blips when one of the guitars developed a  tuning problem.

Then it was  time for the descent down the hill with palm trees silhouetted against the evening blues of the Mediterranean.

Santa Margherita Ligure is a quietly seductive town once tasted never forgotten. Here is a parting momento, not those two guitarists I heard in the Villa Durazzo but the same music, the Gavotte and Six Variations by the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) but this time played by the excellent Zagreb Quitar Quartet reminding us just how well guitars can imitate the harpsichord for which Rameau wrote this music. Look out for some more of my Italian Riviera experiences tomorrow.

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