We are going to dinner in Portofino with my cousin Nino, his wife Linda and their son, whos is four years older than George. We get there fairly early. They’re coming from work, from Genova. We sit at an outdoor restaurant right on the harbor, under umbrellas, as the evening slowly turns to night. The lights go on, and the moon rises.
Presently it starts to rain. The waiters move the umbrellas to cover us and the table better. We stay seated and continue eating, and then the rain stops. It was just a brief shower. Linda is cold, she’s a tiny thing and she’s always cold. I’m used to colder weather so I tend to ignore the slight chill.
After dinner we get ice cream at another place and eat it in the piazzetta, looking out at the harbor. Nino’s son runs into some kids he knows and they chat.
At the mouth of the harbor there is a small hill, the Punta di Portofino. At the top of the hill is a castle, Castello Brown. With the moon in the sky the castle looks spooky. George is a bit thrilled by it, what a magical evening. It's beautiful beyond words really, and to share it with family, people who are happy to be with us and with whom we are happy to be, is special. I don't ever want to leave.
But we do. Leaving town we drive past a line of cars waiting to drive into Portofino. Every time a car leaves, another one can enter the town.
~.~.~
We are going to visit Castello Brown—in the daytime. We walk up the hill bright and early. We walk by the church of St. George, who is the patron saint of Portofino. Throughout the town there are ceramic medallions depicting St. George in various dragon-slaying poses. The church sits on a site believed to have had a roman temple, according to a brochure in English we pick up at Castello Brown. Pliny the Elder, or as the brochure says, Pliny the Old, wrote about the area in the second century A.D. We get to Castello Brown before it opens and we have to wait.
The castle is something less than a castle and something more than a villa. It was originally a fortification, going back at least to the 1400s, to protect the sheltered harbor. In the late 1800s the castle was bought by an English man named Montague Yeats Brown for 7,000 lire. I don’t know if that was a little or a lot at the time. By the time the lira was replaced by the euro, 7,000 lire was about $3.50 in American money. Mr. Brown turned the building into a residence that stayed in his family until it was sold to the town in 1961.
We walk up steps through gardens to get there. Inside it’s sparse. There are pictures of famous people who have visited. And most spectacularly there are beautiful terraces with wide views down to Portofino and out to sea. This would have been a beautiful home with a beautiful garden. It is a little spooky still, up high.
