The roads along here are quite the best of the whole extent of the eastern and western Italian Rivieras. They are encumbered with a new class of traffic not met with further west. Up over the mountain of Portofino winds the road in genuine mountain fashion though beautifully graded and kept. At almost any turning one is likely to meet a great lumbering char-a-banc crowded with tourists, with five, six or eight horses caparisoned like a circus pageant, with bells around their necks, pheasants' feathers bobbing in their top-knots, and a lusty Ligurian on the hindermost seat blowing a coaching horn for all he is worth. This is the Italian and German pleasure seeker's way of amusing himself. He likes it, the rest of us don't!
Santa Margherita is now a full-blown resort with great hotels, bathing-machines and all the usual attributes of a place of its class. Lace-making and coral-fishing are the occupations of the inhabitants who do not live off of exploiting the tourists. Both products are made here (and in Belgium and Birmingham) in the imitation varieties, so one had best beware.
If one doesn't speak Italian, German will answer in all these resorts of the Levantine Riviera, quite as well as French or English. The "Tea-Shop" and "American Bar" signs here give way to those of "Munich" and "Pilsner."
The village of Portofino itself is delightful; a quaint little fishing port surrounded by tree-clad hills running to the water's edge. There is a Hôtel Splendide, once a villa of the accepted Ligurian order, and a less pretentious, more characteristic, Albergo Delfino lower down on the quay. The arms of the little port are a spouting dolphin as befits its seafaring aspect, so the Albergo Delfino certainly ought to have the preference for this reason if no other.
On the cliff road running around the promontory from Portofino to Rapallo are a half a dozen more or less modern villas of questionable architecture, but of imposing proportions, and one and all delightfully disposed.
The Villa Pagana is the property of the Marchese Spinola, and the Castel Paraggi, the property of a gentleman prosaically named Brown, is theatrically and delightfully disposed, though bizarre in form.
Rapallo, at the head of the bay, is a continuation of what has gone before. There are great hotels and pensions, and many of them. Its campaniles and church towers set off the framing of Rapallo delightfully. The Hôtel de l'Europe has more than once been the abode of Queen Margherita of Italy, and most of the notables who pass this way. The hotel curiously enough seems none the worse for it; it is good, reasonable in price and conveniently situated on the quay, overlooking a picturesque granite tower built up from a foundation sunk in the waters of the Mediterranean. The Corsair Dragutte, a buccaneer of romantic days, came along and plundered these Ligurian towns as often as he felt like it. Frequently they paid no attention to his visits, save to give up what blackmail and tribute he demanded; but Rapallo built this tower as a sort of watch tower or fortress. It is an admirable example of a sentinel watch tower, and might well be classed as a diminutive fortress-château.