With our time visiting Camogli at an end and us all back aboard the boat it was time to slice through the waves on our continuing trip around Italy’s coastline, our second destination of the day’s excursion being Santa Margherita Ligure. But first there was the all-important act of revenge to get through.
If you’ve read the first part of this boat trip then you’ll know that there were three excursion groups on the boat. If not, then you know it now. If you’ve ever been on a cruise excursion that involves bus travel then you know that when you get off and back on the bus you return to the seat you’d previously vacated. If not, then you know that now too. There’s a practical reason there, of course, because people often leave items on the bus but while nobody had left items on the boat common, courtesy – to my mind – would dictate that you still adhere to returning to your previously chosen place on the boat at least until it’s underway and you know where the spare seats are. Not everyone thought that way. The boat had seating on two level and when we’d boarded at Genoa most people had chosen the upper deck for the views but also because the boat was below the boarding level so that was closest to the gangway, leaving us, who’d been near the back of queue, to slink downstairs and to the rear. As it turned out, this was a great location because it meant there wasn’t anyone to get in the way of when photographing and at the three stops along the coast disembarkation would take place from the lower deck so we’d be able to get off the boat quicker. Great, as I said. Unless a couple who’d been sitting upstairs decided that the place you’d been in was much more convenient for them and so take it before you boarded when they got on ahead of you.
As we stood, looking at what had been our spot on the boat while the couple casually looked around and deliberately made sure to not catch our eyes, someone we’d been talking to ashore gestured up the stairs as she was boarding.
“Aren’t you coming up top to sit down?” she asked.
“No,” I replied in a loud voice certain to carry to those for whom it was intended. “I wouldn’t want to sit in someone else’s seats. That would be incredibly, incredibly rude. I wouldn’t know if there had been a group of people there I’d be splitting up or forcing elsewhere just because I found somewhere better I wanted. I’m just not that selfish.”
It’s true, I’m not that selfish. But I am very petty. The place where we had been sitting had had great views mostly because nobody had been standing up, leaning against the railing just in front of it. That was no longer true for the couple who’d taken our seats because I made bloody well sure of it for the duration of our next bit of boating. It’s worth noting that the couple chose another place on the boat following this stop on the day trip.
And so to the photos I took along the first part of this boat trip from Camogli. Unlike the first part heading to that fishing village the landscape we passed was far more wild, less decorated with buildings, and we were close enough to see some lovely rock formations and strata.
Our boat then took a slow turn into a small bay where a shallow beach in front of a steep, wooded hill hosted a church with attractive sea-facing cloisters. This was San Fruttuoso and the church was the San Fruttuoso Abbey, named for Fructuosus, a saint and former bishop of a place we very much liked in Spain, Tarragona, and quite possibly the patron saint of ketonic monosaccharides based on his name if I had to guess but don’t quote me on that and certainly don’t let that information slip into any chemistry papers you’re about to hand in.
San Fruttuoso can only be reached on foot or by water which makes the construction of the church here an impressive if strange feat of building from the tenth century onwards. You always find those people who claim that life must include a little bit of suffering and that nothing worth doing is easy but I’ve found that these generally tend to be people who didn’t realise there was a simpler way to do something and want to try to persuade others they meant to make things far more complicated than they needed to be for a super secret reason. Why, yes, I do know lots of project managers.
Here! Let us build a church here, set back from the water’s edge. Let us take donations from people far and wide and hire stonemasons and boats and everything!
Why don’t we build the church on the ridge up there? Lovely views, it’s by a road so transportation costs are down, easier to get to by locals since there’s no steep hill to clamber up and down, and no need for boats.
I’ve already put the plan into my spreadsheet with coloured columns.
Spreadsheets haven’t been invented yet! He’s a witch!
It’s no surprise that the abbey fell into disrepair in the seventeenth century but its later restoration and the transformation of the area into a secluded, sheltered tourist location complete with an underwater statue that people on boats may have been checking out, Christ of the Abyss, make San Fruttuoso a charming diversion along the Ligurian coast.
A short view of the pretty bay complete, we carried on with the planned trip and found ourselves passing the headland behind which Portofino was located. On the rocky outcrop of the headland was the Portofino Lighthouse and regular readers of this site – humour me – will know I’m a sucker for a lighthouse. We would be stopping at Portofino during this boat trip excursion but not just yet.
Even though we were only passing Portofino for the time being you couldn’t help but notice some of its jet set lifestyle reputation spilling out to sea in the form of some yachts that I don’t even want to guess at the price of.
It was only a short boat ride from this point to the municipality that was the second of our day’s stops which we approached swiftly, passing noticeably lower land and a growing number of buildings as we made for its port.
This was Santa Margherita Ligure and one of its main attractions was something our boat slid by just as it was docking: the Castello di Santa Margherita Ligure is these days a memorial to the fallen dead of World War I but its original purpose was to defend against pirate attacks, something that it did from its construction in the middle of the sixteenth century through to around the eighteenth century when piracy ceased.
We were given the option of having a short tour with our guide or exploring what Santa Margherita Ligure had to offer on our own ahead of a meet-up at the port again for the next part of our day’s excursion and we elected to choose the latter after a quick look at the map had indicated there wasn’t a whole lot to see so we might as well do our own thing. The first thing we encountered was a statue to Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of a unified Italy, and a man who had been both excommunicated then readmitted into the Catholic Church and had been described by the British foreign secretary at the time as “an imbecile; he is a dishonest man who tells lies to everyone” which is both something that our current Prime Minister and former foreign secretary might also say these days openly about foreign leaders and be used as an apt description of him.
We headed towards the centre of the town where our guide had indicated there was a church of some note.
The church was the Santuario di Nostra Signora della Rosa which, like the basilica we’d seen in Camogli, was in the baroque style and adorned with another fine example of Risseu, the black and white pebble decorations, at its entrance. This house of worship had also formerly been a basilica, dedicated to Saint Margaret of Antioch, and while its construction dates to the middle of the seventeenth century there is evidence that a church of some description – likely a Marian cult – had existed on the spot from as early as the thirteenth. The stuccos and frescoes were very typical of the period and barely left a spot undecorated in the interior of the church. There was a lot to see and if you’re a fan of the art that thrived in the late renaissance and early modern periods of history then you won’t be disappointed with some time spent here.
With nothing exciting jumping out at us on the map historically we decided to take a wander through what appeared to be the main shopping area on the lookout for potential souvenirs but drew a blank there as well and didn’t find a lot very worthy of photography either other than a statue of Guiseppe Mazzini, a political activist and revolutionary (which, to be fair, almost everyone in Italy at that time was; seriously, that country was just one big mess of revolutions back then), and another example of trompe-l’œil wall decorations, a very popular thing in the region.
With few thrills to be found inland we returned to the promenade area of Santa Margherita Ligure. It was attractive enough with its stone and rock jetties and its wooden piers but there didn’t feel like there was enough of a draw in the place as a whole for us. Indeed, we talked to someone who’d been on the same excursion at the end of the day back aboard Emerald Princess and he said a similar thing in that Camogli had been a lot smaller but felt like somewhere you could spend a day or two whereas Santa Margherita Ligure had a lot more space yet lacked an intangible quality that made you want to remain for long.
We found ourselves back at the port and the meeting place for the boat ahead of schedule to find almost everyone else was there ahead of us so clearly not a lot in the town engaged the time of most of the other people in our tour groups either. With perhaps a little more time at this port stop we would have attempted to see if the castle was open although its small size didn’t seem to indicate it would have held our attention for too long. The sun was starting to burn off the cloud cover at this point although it may not look like it from the photos so it was getting warm enough to send us away from the water’s edge where we’d been observing the seabirds of the region and scurrying for the shade of nearby trees while we waited. A sculpture to a “man of the sea” doing an early Instagram pose by Ligurian sculptor Leonardo Lustig caught the eye.
In the next part of this travelogue series we’ll retrace our steps – well, our boating wake, I suppose – and head the short distance back along the coast to Portofino, playground of the rich and famous, and well known for its pretty views down to its harbour from the hills surrounding it.