On the terrace that once held the gun battery grow two maritime pines: Montague Yeats Brown, British consul in Genoa, planted them for his own wedding. Before it became a roof garden, that open ground was the parade square of the fortress of San Giorgio, the stronghold watching the mouth of the harbour. Excavations have turned up traces of a Roman watchtower; the first firm records of the building date from 1425, when Tomaso Fregoso seized the village and its castle in open breach with Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan. Five years later Francesco Spinola brought it back to Genoa, and the Republic never let it slip again.
What to see
Between 1554 and 1557 the engineer Giovanni Maria Olgiato, trusted designer to Charles V, extended the fortress with a platform facing the harbour: it needed guns, powder and quarters for the garrison against the Barbary raids that had already struck Camogli, Recco and Rapallo. In 1575 the castle threw back an assault by Giovanni Andrea Doria, who had subdued almost every other fort on the eastern Riviera. An inventory of 1697 lists two half-cannon, fourteen smaller pieces and fifty muskets, along with arquebuses, halberds and spears.
The conversion into a house was the work of Alfredo d'Andrade, called in by Yeats Brown after the military decommissioning of 1867: towers raised, the parade square turned into a garden, interiors furnished with fittings salvaged from clippers in a restrained English taste. In the chapel Jocelyn Baber, who bought the castle with her husband John in 1949, found a complete inventory dating from 1607. Since 1961 the building has belonged to the municipality of Portofino, which keeps it open as a museum and exhibition venue.
Visiting
You can only reach it on foot, from the piazzetta up salita al Castello: a stairway between stone walls and private gardens, a quarter of an hour of unbroken climbing. Tickets are sold at the entrance and the rooms hold temporary exhibitions, but the reason to climb is the terrace, with the harbour below and the Gulf of Tigullio in front. Elizabeth von Arnim set her novel The Enchanted April here, published in 1922, and Mike Newell shot part of the film adaptation on the spot in 1991.
Our editors' tip
We go up in the last hour before closing, when the groups have already come down and the light hits the harbour sideways. Then, instead of turning back, we carry on along the path towards the lighthouse: twenty minutes more, and the castle can be seen from outside, set against the rock the way arriving ships saw it.