The Italian Riviera: A Brief History of Looking Expensive

The Italian Riviera invented something the rest of the world has been imitating ever since: being seen relaxing.

Long before Saint-Tropez, before Mykonos, before whatever Croatian island Instagram is currently ruining, there was Liguria – a sliver of coastline between France and Tuscany that decided, sometime in the 19th century, that suffering through summer was for other people.

T he British arrived first, naturally. They always do. By the 1860s, Sanremo had been colonised by tubercular aristocrats convinced the sea air would save them. It rarely did. But it gave us the Promenade de l’Impératrice, named after Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, who spent her winters there refusing to die quietly. The hotels of the era — grand, white, slightly too large – still stand, mostly converted into apartments owned by Milanese dentists.

Then came the writers. Byron swam from Portovenere across the gulf to visit Shelley, which is the most Byron sentence ever written. Nietzsche wandered the cliffs of Rapallo and concluded that God was dead, which seems harsh given the view. Hemingway drank his way through the entire coast and called it research.

By the 1950s, the Riviera had Portofino became the harbour where everyone wore white linen and pretended not to recognise each other.
Sophia Loren ate spaghetti there. Liz Taylor wore sunglasses there. Onassis docked yachts there.
The local fishermen, presumably, kept fishing.

What remains today is the most carefully preserved illusion in Europe: villages painted in colours that shouldn’t exist in nature, restaurants that haven’t changed their menus since 1962, and a pace of life that suggests urgency was a fashion that ended with the Romans.
Go, if you must.
Eat the focaccia. Drink the Vermentino.
Refuse to be impressed by anyone.

That’s how it’s done.