Portofino's culture is not in white-cube galleries but in a castle owned by a British consul, a 10th-century abbey reachable only by boat, and facades painted with fake windows and fake stucco. Three days across the promontory's art history.
Bought in 1867 by British consul Montague Yeats-Brown, who added the terraced gardens and pines. Interior rooms hold period furnishings, the Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton photographs and rotating exhibitions. Open daily 10:00–19:00 in summer.
The 14th-century oratory beside the Divo Martino church houses the confraternity's processional crucifixes — heavy carved and silvered crosses carried in the Ligurian Casacce processions, plus a Byzantine-influenced painted panel of the Assumption.
Portofino's oldest surviving building, 12th-century Romanesque in origin with a Baroque re-dressing. The nave keeps its black-and-white banded Ligurian stonework and a wooden statue of San Martino dividing his cloak, patron of the fishermen's guild.
Liguria's painted architecture tradition: many of Portofino's 'stone' window surrounds, quoins and balustrades are flat paint. Walk Via Roma looking for shadows that fall the wrong way — the giveaway of a quadraturista's brush over plaster.
A 10th-century Benedictine abbey wedged in a cove reachable only by boat or footpath, restored by the FAI. The Doria family tombs sit under striped Romanesque arches, and the cloister opens straight onto the pebble beach.
Guido Galletti's 1954 bronze Christ stands 17 metres down in the bay, arms raised to the surface. A second cast is displayed inside the abbey complex so non-divers can see the work at eye level, alongside the diving history display.
Camogli's captains once owned one of Europe's largest merchant fleets. The museum holds ship models, sextants, ex-voto paintings sailors commissioned after surviving storms, and the ledgers of the mutual insurance society they ran themselves.
An 1876 horseshoe theatre with three tiers of boxes, reopened in 2020 after decades dark. Its programme runs opera, chamber concerts and prose from October to May, with a summer season spilling onto the terrace above the harbour.
A Ligurian Baroque interior of gilt, crystal chandeliers and Genoese marquetry, finished 1658. Holds Flemish and Genoese school canvases and a much-venerated black wooden crucifix carried through the town on 20 July.
A 1678 patrician villa above Santa Margherita, its rooms hung with Ligurian portraits, Genoese lacquer and Murano glass, its salon ceilings frescoed in quadratura. The terraced Italian garden and adjoining English park are open to walk.
Rapallo's bobbin lace — pizzo al tombolo — has been made here since the 16th century. The museum shows over 1,400 pieces, working bobbin pillows and the pattern books local women passed down, inside Villa Tigullio in the seafront park.
Rapallo's centro storico is the region's densest concentration of surviving trompe-l'œil painted architecture, with cataloguing and restoration ongoing. Fake pilasters, saints in niches and painted marble run three storeys up.