Italy’s Prettiest Coastline

Liguria is my favorite region after Tuscany and it may have Italy’s prettiest coastline.

I usually go there to hike and swim but this time the draw is what my friends say are the best fireworks in Italy. My friends who come yearly to their ancestral home in Lucca’s mountains, head to Rapallo every July to see the famous fireworks and I’m spontaneously going with them for a night.

Although I’ve been to Rapallo before, I find delight in the contrast from Lucca’s circular closed-in medieval persona to the stately neoclassical outward-looking buildings of Rapallo’s seaside promenade. Both places are so strikingly lovely in such different ways that to go from one to other, leaves me exclaiming to myself for the hundredth time, about Italy’s beauty.

Rapallo, a city of 30,000 inhabitants, is situated between Genova and La Spezia, on the eastern half of Liguria, known as the Riviera di Levante. Its three-day festival from July 1-3 involves a nightly firework display and processions honoring the Madonna of Montallegro—the town’s patron saint. Her shrine can be reached by taking a funicular up the hill to Montallegro.

We dine at Rocco e I Suoi Fratelli, a fantastic family-run Sicilian restaurant with a menu that begins with a page-long philosophic treatise of which I’ll quote a small part:

A cook is not like the musician but composes ingredients and assembles wood like a carpenter and harmonizes colors like a painter, but the work is not eternal…the kitchen is like your name, you did not choose it but you were taught what it is and who you are and you defend it from those who want to stifle it. So are our Italian kitchens, they are a heritage to be defended.

In the alley behind the restaurant, is their graniteria where you can get real deal Sicilian granita.

By 10:00 we find a spot on the rail of the promenade, where we look across the dark water in anticipation of pyrotechnic excess. I had seen barges there earlier, laden with cases of fireworks.

First come the reciammi—shots that sound like canon fire. The six neighborhoods (sestieri) respond to each other, on either side of the harbor, with volleys of shots back and forth. 

“This reenacts the warnings about pirates,” a local man standing next to me explains. “The festival celebrates the town overcoming the threat of pirates.”

“So how did the Madonna come into it?” I ask him. 

“Ah, because she saved the town from the plague of 1656,” he replies. 

Immense circles of sparkling colors shower down from the black void of the night. Lights pulse toward me, as if to scoop me up. For a moment I feel as if I am one with the nebulae.

When the show is over, at midnight, my friends retire, but I walk the lungomare, taking in the night scene, feeling the conviviality of young and old enjoying a release from the day’s heat. The palm trees are lit up, the gelaterie are in full swing, and a kid expertly plays “My Heart Will Go On” on the violin.

I can’t be in Rapallo and not take in the beauty of the square-shaped peninsula next door, called the Monte di Portofino. Classified as the Parco Naturale di Portofino in 1935, it was one of the first protected areas in Italy and has 80 kilometers of trails.

After my first visit here in 1989, when I hiked from Portofino to San Fruttuoso (a hamlet reachable only by hiking or by boat) I was hooked, and I returned three times in the nineties to experience other trails, from Camogli and from Santa Margherita to San Fruttuoso.

The paths lead through a landscape that is both dramatic and nurturing, along rugged cliffs that cleave the blue-glass sea, and through woods of pines and oaks, skirting citrus and olive groves.

Seven hundred species of plants grow here, thanks to the mild climate, and the towns at either end, Camogli and Portofino, couldn’t be prettier with painted houses in pink and orange and the flat sea at their feet and green wooded hillsides at their backs.

This time my visit was too short to hike and I opted for the boat. In summer the ferry goes every hour, leaving from the middle of Rapallo’s promenade, stopping in Santa Margherita, and Portofino, on the way to San Fruttuoso.

One of the most beautiful things one can do in Italy is arrive in Portofino by boat.

The homes here, high and narrow for lack of space, enchant the visitor with their sun-kissed trompe l’oeil facades. The diminutive harbor has a few superyachts tucked to one side and the town’s little alleys are stuffed with designer boutiques. Portofino has, since Elizabeth Taylor times, been synonymous with jet set.

Laid back San Fruttuoso is my eagerly awaited destination for the day. Here a monastery was erected by Greek monks in the 10th century on the scoop of a pebble beach that is dwarfed by steep green cliffs. I learn that the monastery has been restored since my last visit, by FAI (Fondo Ambientale Italiano, the Italian Environment Trust) and there are now a few places to stay the night in the hamlet.

I clamber up a path, heading to the next cove where the beach is even smaller than the first, but perhaps the crowds more sparse. Cicadas beat in the hot air and below me kids jump off rocks into seducing emerald sea.

There are no food shops and but if you haven’t brought a panino you won’t starve. This tiny hamlet boasts four eateries, all serving Liguria’s famous pesto and the catch the day.

I crawl two feet from my towel to a table pitched in the rocky beach for my fish lunch.

Perfetto.

The swimming is glorious in the warm lake-like water, and I linger until the last ferry leaves at 5:30. Back in Rapallo I’m in time for happy hour with my friends. They will stay on for another night of fireworks and I’ll head to the station to train back to Lucca. I remain at the outdoor table with my mojito until the last possible minute, letting the seduction of this Ligurian idyll sink into my bones.

For more beach towns in Italy go here.