Liguria: The Italian Riviera
It sounds ritzy but it it ranges from swish to a bit rundown. But the coastline is beautiful and it is packed with buildings where people live and visitors stay. There are a million and half people in Liguria, about a million of them in Genoa. That’s the province of Genoa stretches out on both sides, taking in Portofino, Rapallo and the town of Camogli, where I am now.
The Cross of St. George, the sign of the powerful Doge of Genoa, is on every lamppost along the coastline that is part of greater Genoa. You can see a ship waiting to get into the port of the city where Christopher Columbus was born.
What? It looks like the English flag, waved by hooligans at football matches. That is becuase the Doge of Genoa took a payment from the English crown to allow its ships to sail in the Mediterranean. I know I mentioned this last year.
Here is the coastline and that ship from a different vantage point showing the long coastline. There is a lone bather on a rock down there. The fort was to ward off marauding Saracens, a word from Latin to desribe the Islamic Ottomans.
Tuna Tataki
Raw tuna with a crust of ground pistachios and hazelnuts at Primula in Camogli. Speechless.
Rapallo
Rapallo is a fair sized town on the Italian Riviera, on the Ligurian coast between two much more famous places: Portofino and the hyper-popular grouping known as Cinque Terre. To misquote the Guide Michelin, those five villages are not Worth a Visit; jam packed, even in the off season. Maybe try winter. By Rapallo’s harbour, packed with pleasure boats, is a statue of Liguria’s famous son, also a man of the sea.
A friend of mine in London, Brian Kingham, pointed out that this town had a moment of fame early in the 20th century. The Italians were soundly defeated at the Battle of Caporetto. Using new `storm trooper’ tactics the the combined forces of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire defeated the Italians so badly that as many as 600,000 were taken prisoner or deserted. An Italian friend says the name lives on: “A disaster even today is referred to as a real Caporetto.
In November of 1917, 370 days before the end of World War 1, the name Rapallo was if not on everyone’s lips, at least on the front pages of newspapers across Europe.
London’s Daily Sketch ran it as a headline. But the text obscured the fact that the British and French told the Italians —Allies in World War 1— that they were taking over command in Italy. British Prime Minister Lloyd George and French Prime Minister Paul Painlevé told the Italians they were taking charge. Italian Premier Vittorio Emanuele Orlando accepted but was said to have been in tears.
While the Daily Sketch was serious and filled with gung-ho war news the Sunday Pictorial ran a joint lead of a society divorce. Some things never change.
Lloyd George, the British Prime Miniser since December of 1916, took the train from Paris to Rapallo, along with a sizeable delegration and secretary rumoured to be his mistress. The photo below of Clemenceau of France, Lloyd George and Orlando was taken in 1919.
The meeting was held at the New Kursaal Hotel, a Riviera hot spot and popular casino before the war. It was so poplar the original building was town down and a new one took its place. Thus the New in the name. A pre-war advertisement:
The Hotel has since been renamed the Excelsior Palace Hotel.
Lloyd George slept here, I didn’t. The hotel is back to its Riviera roots complete with a swimming spa where a changing hut and a chair set you back €5,000 a season.
The end of a day in paradise.