La Spezia

After a night in Porto Venere we had planned to head off to Viareggio, but again a bad weather forecast interrupted our plans and we decided instead to nose further into the sheltered waters of the Gulf and visit La Spezia itself.  We found a berth at the marina in the middle of town in front of a wide palm fringed boulevard.  The town is nothing special, it’s the home of the Italian Navy and as a consequence was bombed flat during the Second World War, but Sue and I both really fell for the place.  The Gulf itself is very wooded and attractive with small hillside villages and pretty little ports and there are good views of it from parts of the town.  It’s also good for day sailing as the Gulf is wide but very sheltered with lots of interesting places to visit.  The town has excellent shops and a market and is a very relaxing place to simply stroll or sit at a cafe table and watch the world go by.  There was only one disappointment – the Italian Navy.  Not their presence – which is everywhere, but discrete, with a large dockyard and naval harbour and the odd frigate parked in the Gulf – but their uniforms.  Having seen Italian airline pilots with their Ray Ban Aviator sunglasses and immaculately tailored uniforms thrown nonchalantly across their shoulders, I had expected some style and some decent posing.  The average Matelot is however a spotty and round-shouldered youth with a very cheap looking “fits where it touches” blouson and bellbottoms.  The officers are not much better, with ill-fitting jackets that look to be made of thin cardboard.  Definitely more Millets than Versace.

What with La Spezia being such a pleasant place and November looming and the weather worsening we began to think about a winter berth.  I think also with everything that has happened since May we were getting a bit weary.  Over-wintering is a subject which seems to strike panic into the hearts of many liveaboards we have met – good places, it is said, are hard to find and you need to make arrangements much earlier in the year.  We have blithely ignored advice about this for the last four months, unsure whether we were even going to stop.  Our early enquiries confirmed everything we had heard, Porto Lotti, a large marina in the Gulf had no space and neither did the La Spezia town marina, where the staff kindly made enquiries for us with other marinas and moorings, but came up with nothing concrete.  I began to fear that our imprudence had committed us to spending the winter hopping from transit berth to transit berth down the Italian coast in worsening weather.

So, having made the decision that we wanted to stop for the winter and in or near the Gulf of La Spezia if possible, we hired a car and decided to search in earnest.  For two days we drove up and down the coast as far as Viareggio, mainly in pissing rain.  Viareggio is the Tuscan Brighton, with lots of Art Deco buildings along its seafront and at one end a large harbour and boat building centre.  It’s not at its best in a monsoon, but the harbour was fascinating, a maze of small workshops and factories carrying out every kind of boat building, fitting out and refurbishment, from quality joinery to soft furnishing.  The impression it gives is that tradecraft and apprenticeship are still very much alive in Italy and that there is a great deal of pride and status associated with mechanical engineering and other skills.  At the centre of this hive of activity is the Bennetti Boatyard, like a half or quarter scale shipyard, which builds some of the largest and most expensive super super yachts in the world.  One large motor yacht was half built in their large hangar like workshop and another was outside in their dock being commissioned. 

We enquired at the marina where we were told they maybe had some space, but at the far end of the harbour where it could get a bit rough at times and which they really only used for yachts in transit.  To be honest Viareggio is not my sort of place.  It’s full of money and big super yachts and all the trades and hangers-on associated with them.  The bars around the harbour are full of bored professional yacht skippers and crew, many English and Antipodean and there is to me a master and servant atmosphere which I don’t like and actually find a bit intimidating.  Frankly, it’s a Predator 68 kind of place.

Half way through day two we had a couple of possible berths, but nothing firm or that we really liked the look of.  Then we drove round the mouth of the river Magra, just a few miles down the coast from La Spezia towards Viareggio.  The place is a warren of small marinas, boatyards and fishing boats, dominated by yachts for the first mile up to a road bridge and by motorboats for a few miles thereafter.  We made a few enquiries that seemed promising then decided to turn down a narrow track and found the Antica Compagnia Della Vella.  We were shown to the office, in a small ivy covered building where upstairs we met Maria/Giovana (we haven’t worked out which she prefers yet) the proprietor sat at a desk in a slightly untidy little room with a very lovely antique sideboard.  Having spent much of the last two days talking to Italian boatyard and marina blokes (much the same as their English equivalents) it was a refreshing change to speak to a rather elegant middle-aged Italian lady with impeccable English.  “Yes we may have a place for you, would you like to look around?”  Maria/Giovanna spent more time showing us the gardens than the moorings and talking about her “Moroccan boy” and her “German boy”  (Arne and Mahmoud) who live at the marina and help around the place.  We left very enthusiastic, but with two concerns – Sue was worried that it might be too remote and that she could feel cut off and I was concerned about the Magra, it has flooded in the past and could get a bit wild at the height of the Winter I suspect.

The next day we used our last day of the hire car to do the sightseeing thing at Lucca.  It actually made us feel like normal human beings again, having a Sunday drive in the car and that evening we made our decision to stay at Bocca di Magra.  I ‘phoned Maria/Giovanna the next day “I am very pleased” she said “I like you and your style of life”.  

Porto Venere

Indifferent weather and fatigue kept us at Lavagna for four days.  We finally got an OK weather forecast on Sunday 20^th October and headed off in the general direction of La Spezia, about twenty five miles away.  The wind was on the nose yet again but we had bright sunny weather and moderate seas.  The coast to La Spezia is very rocky and much of it is the land of the Cinque Terre, a group of isolated coastal villages, some perched spectacularly around small natural harbours.  La Spezia itself lies at the bottom of a large gulf, a bit like two outstretched arms.  The last four or five miles of the rocky coastline we travelled that day is actually the outside of one of the arms.  About where the wrist would be our charts and pilot book showed a narrow channel about one hundred metres wide and less than three metres deep in places, by a small village called Porto Venere, which leads directly into the Gulf of La Spezia, thus avoiding the trip round the hand (actually a small island).  From about five miles away we could see a dip in the rocky coastline where the channel should have been.  From about three miles a large castle was visible to the left of the dip.  The channel itself was not visible until we were within a few hundred metres and fortunately two large trip boats showed us the way in.  It’s a strange feeling going straight at a rocky coastline then having it tower above you on either side.  The echo sounder showed the depth plummet from forty odd metres to just four or five, then suddenly on our left the harbour of Porto Venere hove into view.  Having seen just a handful of boats all day we were confronted by a busy and picturesque little harbour, full of yachts and tourists out for a Sunday stroll with more yachts at anchor in the calm waters of the Gulf of La Spezia.

Our pilot book said that there was only room for thirty odd yachts in the harbour and it was often not possible to find a place, but we went in anyway and to my surprise were directed to a berth.  So within the space of thirty minutes we had gone from a sailing a lonely and barren coastline in moderate seas to the flat calm shelter of a busy tourist trap.  In a daze we wandered the narrow streets of the town in which Byron once lived and out of which he drowned whilst swimming across the Gulf of La Spezia.  A careless lot these romantic poets –shortly before this Shelley had drowned on the other side of the Gulf when his yacht sank on a passage from Livorno.  In their honour the Italians have an alternative name for the area – the Gulf of the Poets.  I can understand why Byron liked it here, the scenery is straight out of a gothic novel – an old harbour with tall quayside houses, dominated by a church and a castle on separate rocky promontories from which can be seen the windswept and barren coastline on the other side of the Gulf.  To complete the day we dined at a very friendly local Trattoria by the harbour which was full of the buzz of local families having their supper.

Lavagna

When I last wrote we were in Genova.  In the end we stayed four days, despite the cost of mooring there.  Generally, Sue and I tend to like the same places, but over Genova we disagreed – I loved it and Sue didn’t.  Genova is an ancient port (the hometown of Columbus) and the docks are physically and spiritually at the centre of the City.  These days it has become a major stop on the itinerary of the Med cruise ships and at any one time there are several, each the size of a small Council estate, tied up in the docks, with at least one or two entering or leaving daily.  Over the last decade the City has had a major clean up and the docks are becoming more sanitised, with a new Aquarium, marinas and the inevitable warehouses converted into flats and shops, not to mention the pirate’s galley from “Hook”.  Like Glasgow, Genova has also hitched its wagon to the European Community heritage gravy train and is to be European City of Culture in 2004, a title it probably has rather more claim to than the home of Rab C Nesbitt.

Despite the clean up Genova still has its dark side.  Ridley Scott could easily have taken his inspiration for the cityscapes in “Blade Runner” from the Old Town, which fronts the main dock.  The area mainly comprises tall tenement blocks which shut out the light from the narrow streets, even at midday.  There is much decay and in places walls are held up with scaffolding.  Parts of the Old Town are really ancient and medieval churches live cheek by jowl with 1960s concrete structures and in the most unexpected places one can find a sixteenth century fountain or a renaissance wall frieze.  At night the place is very dark with pools of neon light which give a sinister depersonalised hue to the cosmopolitan faces in the crowds that jostle through the alleys.  There are small shops and cafes everywhere, from upmarket leather goods emporia to bakers, butchers and tatty little ethnic general stores.  Sue didn’t find the atmosphere very sympathetic, especially the absence of the Sun, but I enjoyed strolling round the place after dark observing the little cameos that would be revealed by a street lamp or the bright lights of a shop interior.

We finally left on Tuesday 15^th October with a general intention to get as far down the Italian coast as we could before the Winter set in earnest.  Our first destination was Lavagna, a seaside town with a large marina twenty odd miles up the coast.  One of the English speaking marina staff at Genova helpfully gave us an assessment of the weather conditions in pure Italian accented Sarf London – “Southerly winds and one/two metre seas to Portofino, then calm, no wind”.  Well he was more or less right about the first bit, but not the second.  With the wind on the nose as usual we motored in quite steep seas, with rain clouds scudding by and producing the occasional squall.  Portofino is possibly the most fashionable resort in the whole of the Med, although little more than a grown up village with a small harbour.  We saw little of it through the lowering rain clouds and as we headed on to Lavagna the seas if anything got steeper.  Getting into the marina was a bit challenging as I tried to keep La Fulica on a straight course as she rolled and bucked towards the narrow harbour entrance.

The marina is huge and professional with space for about 1,500 boats.  Stuck near the end of one of its very long pontoons we actually had a lot of privacy and anonymity, which made a pleasant change.  Our time was spent strolling the nearby town centre and that of neighbouring Chiavara.  At Lavagna we made extensive use of what is probably the best guidebook to Italy – Marcella Hazan’s “The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking”.  I jest not, if you are going to Italy, especially self-catering, take a copy with you.  Good traditional food seems to be central to the Italian way of life and Marcella spends a lot of time on the qualities of the main ingredients of Italian cooking and on the order in which courses are taken, as well as basic recipes.  Apart from anything else this will allow you to experience the unusual pleasure of going into food shops and markets with a recipe and actually being able to find all the ingredients, instead of having to make do with ersatz or untried alternatives – “do you think it matters if we leave out the nutmeg?”, “do you think bacon will do instead of Pancetta?”  I’m nervous about making generalisations about nationalities, but the Italian passion for food and for traditional ingredients was very well illustrated for me by a middle aged couple in a grocers store who must have spent ten minutes in a passionate debate about which of the fifteen brands of Olive Oil to buy.  I liked them even more when, looking up, they realised I was watching them and they suddenly laughed at the absurdity of their behaviour, then looked slightly sheepish.

Genova Porto Antico

It’s a bright sunny day here in Porto Antico, the Genovese St Katherine’s Dock and I must say I’m finding it hard to get my head round the extremes of Med weather, two days ago in Finale Ligure it was like a wet weekend in Bolton, dark cold and depressing, now we have sunshine which if this were July in England would have the cars bumper to bumper all the way to the South Coast.  Even today you can take your pick and go out in boots and an overcoat or shorts and flip flops, depending on which side of the streets you decide to walk.  Still, I mustn’t complain, this City is rather delightful.  Here in the marina we’re surrounded by smart yachts, cargo ships, cruise liners and most improbably the very baroque pirate’s galleon built for the film “Hook”.  We arrived yesterday and can probably afford to stay only another night or two as the mooring fees take up half our daily budget.  But, heck – who needs food anyway.  The port is amazing, a rabbit warren of docks and marinas with yachts, tugs, police boats, container ships and cruise liners coming at you from every angle – all watched over by the sixteenth century City Lighthouse which stands over one hundred metres tall and as the City Guide “Genoa – Gate of the Mediterranean” proudly tells us – “incessantly casts it yellow lightening thirty three miles away”.  It all seems a very long way from our time at Frioul.

Welcome to Italy

Now that we are well and truly travelling “in” our chosen cruising ground there is a constant tension between travelling to the next place and enjoying the place you are in.  Also, although we have set aside months or even years to travel in this way, one cannot go everywhere.  After five days in Juan les Pins we therefore decided to move on and although Nice, Menton and Monaco were all just up the coast, we felt that Italy was now called for.  So on Monday 7^th October we set off for San Remo, with the weather still holding good.  Again letting the autohelm do most of the work we watched the last of the French Riviera and Monaco slip by in warm sunshine, arriving in San Remo in mid-afternoon in the wake of a big British super yacht.  Just to be on the safe side Sue had telephoned the marina in advance, having prepared the appropriate Italian phrases, this wasn’t necessary and she was advised in impeccable English that “yes, we do have a berth and we would be pleased to see you”.

We had to wait for half an hour or so on the holding quay, while virtually the whole staff of the marina helped park the super yacht.  We were then guided to a berth on one of the big yacht pontoons, between a thirty plus metre ketch and a thirty-metre motorboat.  It felt a bit like being in the Grand Canyon.  High above us, the English and Antipodean crew of the ketch were busy polishing the already gleaming brass and chrome and bleaching the almost cream coloured teak.  As well as feeling a little intimidated I found the pontoon pretty soulless – the trouble with these big yachts is that everyone is hung up on status and is embarrassed to say “hello” and hardly anyone actually loves the boat they own or work on.  Give me a scruffy little marina where people come down to potter and socialise any day of the week.

Although tired and after six or more weeks in France a bit culture-shocked we couldn’t resist a stroll around San Remo.  After the laid back atmosphere of Antibes it was brash, busy, smog filled and remarkably unpretentious.  From the main square we climbed out of the centre up through a jumble of medieval alleys and tenement buildings until we had a view of the sea and the large yacht harbour where La Fulica was hob-knobbing with the super yachts.  Next day, we pressed on to Finale Ligure, about thirty miles east of Genova, where the weather closed in on us for a few days.  The marina staff were really nice there, but as we were visitors they wouldn’t give us a security pass to the toilets, so every time we wanted to use the loo or the showers we had to go to the marina workshop and like embarrassed schoolchildren ask to be let in.  Finale Liguria is a pleasant seaside town surrounded by mountains which are apparently a Mecca for free climbers (nutters who do it without ropes).  However, it is not at its best in continuous torrential rain preceded by a mile walk from the marina through two busy road tunnels neither of which has a footpath.  Neither is its atmosphere improved by hordes of wet and bored German free climbers trudging through the town and slumped in disconsolate groups in the cafes.