Portofino
— — a half-ring of painted houses around water holding still.
Not only on a wall.
“A small harbour on its own promontory east of Genoa, where the Ligurian hills come down to a half-ring of houses in ochre, apricot, and faded red. Pliny called it Portus Delphini, the port of the dolphin. For centuries it was a fishing village of a few hundred people; then, late in the nineteenth century, the British arrived by cart from Santa Margherita Ligure and never quite left. The piazzetta opens straight onto the water and the boats. Above it, the church of San Giorgio and the old fort hold the headland. The harbour faces east, so the colour comes up first thing, before the day's boats have moved.
Portofino, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Portofino is a comune of fewer than five hundred residents in the Metropolitan City of Genoa, on the eastern flank of a wooded promontory that separates the Gulf of Tigullio from the Gulf Paradiso. The village clusters around a small natural harbour roughly thirty-six kilometres east of Genoa. The whole headland is protected as the Parco Naturale Regionale di Portofino, threaded with footpaths that link Portofino to Santa Margherita Ligure and, over the ridge, to Camogli. There is no railway into the village; most visitors come by the coast road or by ferry from Santa Margherita Ligure and Rapallo, as the British aristocracy first did by horse and cart in the late nineteenth century.
Above the harbour stands Castello Brown, a fortified house the Republic of Genoa first raised as the Castello di San Giorgio to guard the port, on a site used for defence since Roman times. The fort saw action across centuries of Mediterranean conflict, holding off the Genoese admiral Aitone D'Oria in 1330, a Venetian fleet in 1431, and a British squadron in 1814. It took its present name from Montague Yeats-Brown, the British consul at Genoa who bought it in 1867. Higher on the headland, the church of San Giorgio keeps relics said to be the saint's; first built in 1154, it was destroyed four times in war and rebuilt each time, most recently after bombing in the Second World War.
Portofino's harbour opens onto the Gulf of Tigullio, and the clearest water on the promontory lies just around the headland, in the cove of San Fruttuoso, reachable only on foot or by boat. There, below a Romanesque abbey founded in the eighth century, a bronze figure called the Cristo degli Abissi stands on the seabed at a depth of about seventeen metres. It was lowered in 1954 in memory of Dario Gonzatti, the first Italian to dive with scuba gear, who died in these waters in 1947. Divers and snorkellers reach it from the surface; from the abbey beach the statue is invisible, a presence the water keeps to itself. The sea off the promontory is now a protected marine area.