The official name is piazza Martiri dell'Olivetta, and it remembers the twenty partisans shot on the night of 2 and 3 December 1944 at nearby Olivetta by fascist soldiers under the command of Siegfried Engel. Almost nobody uses it in speech: in Portofino this square is the Piazzetta, A Ciassetta in Ligurian, and it is the point where the village opens onto the waterfront.
What to see
The square is small, pressed between the arcaded houses painted in the colourful local manner known as alla genovese, above all along calata Guglielmo Marconi to the north-east, and open on the seaward side, where boats moor along molo Umberto I. Every narrow lane in the village converges here, and the main hotels, cafés and shops all face onto it. For a sense of scale: Portofino has 357 residents and a territory of 2.53 sq km, the smallest municipality in the entire Metropolitan City of Genoa.
In July 2012 the Piazzetta was recognised as a Locale storico d'Italia, the first and only certificate issued by the association of that name, awarded for its historical and cultural value. A few weeks later, on 11 and 12 August 2012, Andrea Bocelli gave two concerts here for the Sugar record label: the recordings produced a CD/DVD and a film titled Love in Portofino, screened in cinemas in 50 countries. The title came from the song Dalida turned into a hit in 1959, recorded the year before by Fred Buscaglione.
Visiting
You arrive by land along the road down from Santa Margherita Ligure, the neighbouring town to the north, or by sea, stepping ashore at molo Umberto I, which closes the square on the water side. The Piazzetta is one of the most touristic and fashionable spots in Portofino, so in the middle of the day it is full: reckon on tables, cameras and very little free ground. There is nothing to pay and nothing to book, apart from the chair you sit on.
Our editors' tip
We get here early, while the bars are still setting out their chairs and the square goes back for an hour to being a village of a few hundred people. Then we climb to Castello Brown, the fifteenth-century fortress above the harbour, and look down at it: from up there you grasp how small it really is. Before you leave, read the name on the sign again: the place is famous for quite other reasons, but the name speaks of that December night.
