Splendido Liguria: How this Australian author is living La Dolce Vita on the Italian Riviera
Fine food and sumptuous hotels are the subject of a glossy new Belmond project.
When I first visited Liguria, the coastal region in the north of Italy that borders France, my friend and I had chosen to leave Portofino off our list.
We were both 20, originally from Australia and living in London trying to work out who we wanted to be when we grew up. We spent our days lounging like lizards on rocks and swimming in the aquamarine sea, and our evenings eating fried seafood from rolled-up paper cones and plates of pesto that stained all the outfits we packed.
I was going into my final year of university where I was studying literature, and carried a little notebook around with me to scribble ideas for my dissertation. I’d always been fascinated by hotels and wanted to write about them as a space to tell stories, as they were where so many of my favourite books were set.
What I didn’t know then, though, was how hotels, books and Portofino would come back into my life a decade later. The week I turned 30, I was appointed editor at Belmond, the LVMH-owned hospitality brand that owns some of the most famous hotels in the world, including Hotel Cipriani in Venice, Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro and the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. My job is to work alongside an amazing team to create books, films and content centred on Belmond’s hotels, trains and boats (boats with pools on them, I might add). It brings pinch-me moments every month, from waking up to swans peering at me through a window on a riverboat in Burgundy, to spending Valentine’s Day making a film with chef Raymond Blanc at landmark restaurant, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire.
But serendipitously it was Liguria and the tiny town of Portofino where I was to kick off my first big project, as ever since that first trip to the region, I’ve returned to the curved coastline of Liguria each year.
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We were creating the first-ever cookbook produced by Belmond and, a year after writing my own, Table For Two, I knew what a joy it is to make a book about food, travel and the beauty of both. Liguria: Recipes & Wanderings Along the Italian Riviera contains recipes from the Splendido and Splendido Mare hotels and is the first book in a new series titled Recipes & Wanderings, a collaboration between Belmond and Apartamento publishing.
On the train from Milan I passed the places I’d spent different holidays during my twenties. Hotels I’d stayed at with my mum for special occasions and restaurants I wrote about in my cookbook passed by outside as the train pulled closer to Santa Margherita Ligure. I didn’t know what to expect of Portofino. But on the short drive from the station to Splendido Mare, a Belmond hotel situated in the centre of Portofino’s Piazzetta, I started to see exactly why it’s so special.
It would be so easy at first glance to imagine that Portofino is just some postcard-perfect town. The way the façades of the buildings are painted to appear adorned with flower boxes and ancient-looking arches makes it feel as though it could tip over with just a slight breeze, as though it had been set up on a Hollywood sound stage. It’s so synonymous with breathtaking beauty that it doesn’t surprise me to know that there is a full-scale replica of Portofino Bay at Universal Orlando Resort in Florida.
But as I wandered around the town that first Sunday morning in the December sunshine, I saw a community come to life. Inside Divo Martino, the grey and yellow-striped church built on the site of a 12th-century chapel, I listened to a group of locals singing hymns. When I walked up to the Church of San Giorgio on the other side of the bay to watch the sunset, I saw a woman carrying a small bunch of flowers to the graveyard behind the building. I returned three more times in the process of finishing the book and saw clearly that there are so many sides to Portofino that don’t make it to postcards or a perfect Instagram post.
It’s what Laura Jane Coulson, the book’s photographer, captured in its pages. During the week-long photoshoot, we took boat trips along the coast, making snacks by sandwiching together tomatoes, our fingers glossed with Ligurian olive oil and salt from the enormous slices of crisp focaccia Genovese. We woke at dawn to sleepily capture the magic golden light that glows over the water at Baia Cannone, swam in the icy April water, and ate oranges as the sun rose over the sea.
Against all this stunning scenery are the characters that make Portofino a place like no other. It’s home to people like sixth-generation Portofino native Mino Viacava, the founder of La Portofinese Eco Farm perched above Splendido. The honey, jam and drinks made here are served in the hotel. It’s where you can sit down at a table in Trattoria Concordia every night and hear the town’s local ticket inspector belt out Italian classics by the piano for all to sing along.
Alongside an introduction from The River Cafe’s legendary Ruth Rodgers, essays and recipe contributions by chefs such as Andy Baraghani, and Max Rocha, and food writer Fanny Singer, are 20 recipes from the kitchen of Splendido. We worked with Splendido’s chef Corrado Corti on his famous recipes, such as Spaghetti alla Elizabeth Taylor. I wanted to think of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor asking for tomato spaghetti after getting engaged on the wisteria-covered balcony of Suite 471 at Splendido in 1964. It is not a typically Ligurian dish, and I pictured this twist on the classic spaghetti pomodoro being delivered to them via room service, with Richard wrapped in sheets and Elizabeth adorned in diamonds.
The book also explores the region’s culinary community, such as La Portofinese Eco-Farm and the historic Antica Confetteria shop, which not only supply Belmond’s Portofino hotels, but are unique to Liguria’s history. Here, the chefs are committed to drawing from the surrounding land, treasuring the famous Genovese basil grown on the hills of Prà and found across every menu in the hotels, from breakfast, lunch and dinner.
By total coincidence, the week the book was published my friend and I had planned a trip to mark 10 years since our first adventure to Liguria. But this time we didn’t skip Portofino. Instead, we walked up to the lighthouse to drink Portofino Spritzes in the sunshine, ate gelato at Gelateria Bar San Giorgio, had lunch on Splendido’s terrace, and swam until the sky started shifting to shades of pink at Paraggi Beach.
Liguria: Recipes & Wanderings Along the Italian Riviera by Belmond and Apartmento.
This story is from the September issue of WISH.
