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”.