⛵ Portofino
Portofino is, without question, one of our favorite villages in Italy. We first visited back in 2006 aboard the Seabourn Legend, and the town itself hasn’t changed much since. It’s still a beautiful, picturesque village set in an enchanting cove, with high hills rising on all sides. One side of the cove is lined with colorful four- and five-story multigenerational homes, typically with a restaurant storefront at sea level, the stories climbing up against the granite rock behind them, with the top floors fronting the road higher up the hill. The opposite side holds the remnants of an old fort and a trail you can hike up to, along with several spectacular homes overlooking the water. That water is the Gulf of Tigullio, the wider bay that Portofino sits at the western edge of, along with its neighbors Santa Margherita Ligure and Rapallo.
The cove used to be filled with smaller sailboats on one side and colorful little fishing boats moored on the other. Between the protected cove, the fishing boats, and the view out to the bay, it’s easy to see why Portofino became a tourist favorite in the first place.
We returned by car a few years ago and found the town overrun with tourists, enough that we only stopped for a quick lunch before moving on. Arriving this time, tendering in from the Wind Surf, we found an equally busy town, just dressed differently. The colorful fishing boats had been replaced with luxury yachts, some seemingly too big for the little cove to hold. The small sailboats gave way to sleek, oversized sailing yachts, and the larger boats that used to ferry tourists between towns along the coast were constantly coming and going at the central dock. The village is still every bit as beautiful, but today it’s every bit as much a busy tourist hotspot.
🚤 On to Rapallo
We arrived by tender and quickly boarded one of the larger ferry boats headed to the town of Rapallo, two towns down the coast, just past Santa Margherita. The ride took about twenty to twenty-five minutes and was genuinely scenic, with the town of Santa Margherita off to our left and the bay dotted with small sailboats out for their morning training races.
As we approached Rapallo, our guide got on the loudspeaker to give us a bit of the town’s history. The waterfront castle, Castello sul Mare, went up in 1551 to defend against the pirate raids that plagued this coast for centuries. By the early 20th century, Rapallo’s mild winters had made it a favorite retreat, not just for well-off Italians but for a surprising cast of writers and artists: Ezra Pound lived here two decades and wrote much of his Cantos in town, Max Beerbohm called it home for over forty years, and Nietzsche reportedly wrote part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra here one winter.
We were booked on a highly acclaimed pesto-making and food tour with Guido. The reviews were excellent enough that we paid a higher-than-usual price for the excursion, and it was worth every bit of it.
🧀 Meeting Guido
Guido welcomed us with a big smile and a hearty “buongiorno” in front of his wonderful storefront, right across the street from the dock. He’s got the personality to be a star on the Food Network, genuinely warm and upbeat in a way you can’t fake. His elderly father sat off to one side while his son helped finish setting up our pesto-making class right out front, big umbrellas providing shade for both the food and the pesto-makers. Other helpers circulated quickly, passing out wine glasses and pouring wine or water, with salami and bread making the rounds too.
Guido’s store, we learned, has been in the family for four generations. His team also handed everyone what they called “wine walkers,” little red pouches worn around the neck that your wine glass sits in, freeing up both hands for eating or carrying whatever else you’d picked up along the way. They’d thought of everything. All morning, Guido’s helpers circulated with refills of water and wine, even as we walked through the city between restaurants and eateries. That’s service, and honestly, only in Italy.
🧑🍳 The Pesto Show
Guido quickly picked out one passenger and his two teenage daughters to help him demonstrate pesto-making for the group, with four full pesto-making stations set up for the rest of us. Everyone got a cardboard recipe card to take home, which fit perfectly into our new wine walkers alongside the actual wine.
He walked us through why the ingredients mattered so much, all sourced locally: fresh, mild basil, Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano Reggiano, three different salts, a little garlic, and high-quality olive oil. He showed us how to peel and crush the garlic, mashing it with the pestle, then building in the cheeses, salt, basil, and oil one at a time. There were three distinct techniques for mashing, grinding, and mixing everything together into a beautiful, genuinely delicious pesto, which we all sampled with local bread. Every pesto-making trainee got to keep their apron and walked away with an official certificate from Guido himself. Fun, informative, and a total hit with the group. And that was just the warm-up.
🥖 The Food Tour
Next came the food tour, starting with a walk through Guido’s own shop, stocked floor to ceiling with wine, olive and balsamic oils, olives, and other delicacies, with a full butcher counter on the other side hung with cured meats and plenty of other temptations.
Guido led us through the streets of Rapallo, greeted warmly by nearly everyone we passed. He could have run for mayor and won without much of a campaign. We wound through the medieval streets to a church where a few local women were making their own pesto for an event later that day, and Guido explained the friendly rivalry between the city’s districts and the three-day festival that had just wrapped up. He gave us a running history of the town as we walked, while his not-so-little helpers kept the wine and water flowing for anyone still interested. I stuck to water myself after that first glass at the pesto demonstration, though apparently it’s never too early for wine or gelato in Europe, which is exactly one of the reasons I love visiting.
We wound past a town square and down a narrow street to a restaurant serving a delicious stuffed pasta in a white cream walnut sauce, then on to a bakery for a thin, flaky, cheese-stuffed focaccia, warm out of the oven and melt-in-your-mouth good. More wine, anyone? A little further down the street we sampled fresh-cut salami before heading back to Guido’s store for gelato, and, naturally, more wine for anyone still up for it. With the tour officially over, we had a chance to shop the store ourselves. We picked up a can of extra virgin olive oil for friends back home, and I found a bar of dark chocolate that might be the best thing I’ve ever tasted. There’s none left now, but I’m on the lookout for more of it in every town we stop in from here on out.
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