PORTOFINO

Portofino has around four hundred residents and one of the most photographed harbours in Europe, which is a difficult ratio to live with. The village occupies a notch in the cliff barely two hundred metres across — there was never room to grow, and that is precisely why it looks the way it does.

The houses are painted in ochre, rose and terracotta, and much of the architectural detail is painted too: shutters, cornices and window surrounds that turn out, close up, to be trompe l'oeil on a flat wall. A poor fishing village's way of looking richer than it was, kept up now out of habit and law.

This is the Riviera di Levante — the coast east of Genoa. The light comes in low off the water and the whole harbour turns gold for about twenty minutes each evening.