Some days you give to the town, and some you give to the sea. This one belonged to the water from the moment I woke, when the light on the ceiling was already moving the way it only does when it rises off the harbour.
We left from the little quay after breakfast in one of those wooden boats that seem to have been polished by hand for a hundred years. The engine caught, the town slipped quietly behind us, and the whole coast opened in a way it never does from the road. From the water, Portofino stops being a place you can walk across in ten minutes and becomes something else entirely, a scatter of ochre and rose held between the green of the hills and the deeper green of the sea. I sat near the bow in a linen shirt over my swimsuit and let the wind take my hair without trying to keep it tidy. There is no point. The sea always wins that argument, and it is right to.
We went the long way, past villas half hidden among the pines, past coves you could only reach by swimming, until the cliffs closed around us and the water turned that impossible clear jade. Then, where you would swear there was nothing but rock and forest, San Fruttuoso appeared.
I did not expect it to move me the way it did. It is a Benedictine abbey folded into a cove so narrow the sea comes right up to its arches, reachable only by boat or by a long walk over the headland, which is precisely why it has remained as it is. A thousand years of quiet, kept by the water. We cut the engine and drifted the last little way in. No one on the boat spoke, and I understood why. Some places ask that of you.
We swam there, just off the pebbled shore, in water so clear it hardly seemed to be there at all. Below, in the deeper part of the bay, there is a bronze figure the divers go down to see, the Christ of the Abyss, resting on the seabed with his hands lifted toward the surface. I did not go all the way down. Instead I floated above that cold blue with my face in the water and my breath held, and I could just make out his pale shape below, arms open to the light falling in long shafts through the sea. I stayed suspended there, unwilling to break the surface just yet. I said the small thing I always say, the private one, the thank you that does not need a church to become a prayer. For the morning. For the water. For being carried, in every sense, to a place like this.
When I lifted my head again, the sun was warm on my shoulders, and a boy on the abbey terrace was selling cold lemon granita. Both things were true at once: the deep quiet and the ordinary brightness of the day. I have stopped thinking I have to choose between them.
The afternoon moved more slowly. We drifted back around the point and dropped anchor in a cove near Paraggi, where the sand is pale gold and the umbrellas stand in neat green-and-white rows. I did very little that was worth writing down and everything that was worth doing. I lay half in the shallows with my eyes closed and let the small waves move me. I ate slices of peach from the back of the boat with the juice running down my wrist. I watched the light change from white to honey to that low gold that means the day is spending itself, and I did not reach for my phone to catch it, because some light is not for keeping, only for being inside while it lasts.
We came home the way we had left, from the water, the town lighting itself one window at a time as we drew closer. My skin smelled of salt and sun cream, and the day would not quite wash away in the shower. I was glad of that. There are days you carry on your skin for a while afterwards, and this was one of them.
I keep thinking about that figure beneath the water, hands open, patient, asking nothing. There is a kind of faith that stands in the light and announces itself, and there is another that waits quietly beneath the surface for whoever thinks to look. I have always trusted the second kind more. Today the sea let me see it, and then it let me go, warm and tired and full, back to the little harbour where the lamps were beginning to glow.
If the water tempts you the way it did me, the practical side of this coast, the boats out to San Fruttuoso and the striped umbrellas of Paraggi, is in my complete guide to Portofino.
V.
