Day 10 From Turin to fancy Portofino

Grand Tour

In which Sid and Doris take Hermann up the steepest, tiniest, abandoned track over the hills to the land of dolce vita film stars and the €17 gin and tonic.Sunday morning traffic is as welcome to the classic driver as to the touring cyclist. In the car the cobbles matter less. We are soon embarked on the autoroute out of Turin. We pass Lingotto, the Fiat factory and the museum – we can go back again for that.

We tried the old road but a string of ordinary little towns and their 50 kph limit slowed progress too much and we got back on for motorway cruising – even the autoroute itself became a tiny wiggly channel cut through old towns and tight gorges.
Leaving this we get up into the hills and it begins to feel slightly adventurous, a bit of a climb and some old tunnels. Doris has picked a road to go over the last hills before dropping down onto Rapallo. There is a tussle between Doris and the Google maps lady navigator and eventually Doris bullies the phone into accepting an early right turn in Cicagna that is not signposted to anywhere. It is immediately single track, it climbs like a goat chasing a Harrier jump jet. And Hermann goes with them, though the surface is deformed, broken and sprinkled with first gear hairpins. In places the road has fallen down the mountain and is very narrow.
Eventually we break out onto the road we and Mrs Google Nav had first thought of. Good. Hermann is still cool and though we have seen a Lancia Fulvia sedan today (not Coupe) Hermann is awarded conveyance of the day. We will offer this road to Mark Appleton, purveyor of horrible routes to the gentry.
 
The touristica fantastica route is by the sea from Rapallo to Portofino, a village that was the Italian St Tropez. Here came Onassis, Sophia Loren, Bogart and Bacall, Agnellis. Our hotel is in the harbour end of the village, we have taken the walk to the lighthouse and visited the Yeats Brown family’s Castello Brown. Here, and at the summer home of the Munn champagne family, statesmen came to dinner – many German. They seem either to have resigned their military or political roles in the early 1930s or been implicated in the July 1944 Stauffenberg bomb plot against Hitler and been killed. The walk back to town gives views over the bay that seem not to have changed since the ’30s… and a view back to the mainland that shows Hermann’s pass of glory (marked with a red arrow).

We have dinner by the water and have a tremendous time people watching.  We also observe some outfits in the Louis Vuitton window which each cost over €7,000, a sum which Sid considers could be far better spent on a really good motorsport event… and which would probably make him look less ridiculous too.  The designer face mask is particularly er remarkable.

Later we wander round the harbour and idly contrast the gin palaces with the remaining Portofino fishing fleet (it is so lovely to come to an unspoiled village darling).  We speak to a Belgian family on their 40′ sail boat who in turn have been watching the antics on Idol, a 58 metre monster motor yacht moored nearby – and, irritatingly, obscuring their entire scenic view of the village and the port. The Belgians report many girls in skirts not yet fully grown. Sid surmises probably it is a charity taking thin young persons from poor backgrounds around the Mediterranean for their health and education.