Recco is an attractive and populous town, but has no monuments of note.
The highroad here climbs up the mountain of Portofino where the promontory joins the mainland, and drops down the other side to Rapallo, Santa Margherita, Cervara and Portofino. High up on the mountain cape is the Monastery of San Fruttoso, a picturesque and solitary conventual establishment in whose chapel are many tombs of the Dorias, all with good Gothic sculptures. In the convent of Cervara, en route to the village of Portofino on the east side of the cape, François I, just after he lost “all save honour” at the battle of Pavia, was imprisoned previous to his voyage to Spain in the galleys which were to carry him a captive to the domain of Charles Quint.
The roads along here are quite the best of the whole extent of the eastern and western Italian Rivieras. They are encumbered with a new class of traffic not met with further west. Up over the mountain of Portofino winds the road in genuine mountain fashion though beautifully graded and kept. At almost any turning one is likely to meet a great lumbering char-a-banc crowded with tourists, with five, six or eight horses caparisoned like a circus pageant, with bells around their necks, pheasants’ feathers bobbing in their top-knots, and a lusty Ligurian on the hindermost seat blowing a coaching horn for all he is worth. This is the Italian and German pleasure seeker’s way of amusing himself. He likes it, the rest of us don’t!
Santa Margherita is now a full-blown resort with great hotels, bathing-machines and all the usual attributes of a place of its class. Lace-making and coral-fishing are the occupations of the inhabitants who do not live off of exploiting the tourists. Both products are made here (and in Belgium and Birmingham) in the imitation varieties, so one had best beware.
If one doesn’t speak Italian, German will answer in all these resorts of the Levantine Riviera, quite as well as French or English. The “Tea-Shop” and “American Bar” signs here give way to those of “Munich” and “Pilsner.”
The village of Portofino itself is delightful; a quaint little fishing port surrounded by tree-clad hills running to the water’s edge. There is a Hôtel Splendide, once a villa of the accepted Ligurian order, and a less pretentious, more characteristic, Albergo Delfino lower down on the quay. The arms of the little port are a spouting dolphin as befits its seafaring aspect, so the Albergo Delfino certainly ought to have the preference for this reason if no other.
