Inspiration: discover the Blog

Portofino has been the object of intelligent desire for seventy years. The painted harbour, the pine-covered promontory, the piazzetta at six in the evening: none of it disappoints. The question is only how to experience it without the crowds. We have the answer.

The five villages of the Cinque Terre cling to the Ligurian coast with the tenacity of people who have always understood that the sea is both their livelihood and their escape route. The best way to visit them is still the one their founders used: from the water.

There are destinations that seduce you with their beauty alone, and then there are places that reveal themselves slowly — through a bolt of hand-loomed cashmere draped across a sun-warmed counter, a pair of sandals traced to your foot on a cobblestone floor, a ceramic glazed in colors that exist only on this particular stretch of Italian coastline. Portofino and Positano are both.

Few places in the world reward the traveler who arrives by sea. Cinque Terre is one of them.