Rapallo

The castle on the sea, planted in the water since 1551 against the corsairs, is the signature of Rapallo, and there is a date that explains it: on the fourth of July 1549, at dawn, the fleet of the pirate Dragut entered the gulf and landed at three points. A hundred or so people of Rapallo were carried off as slaves, the provost of Santo Stefano was killed, and while help from Genoa came late, from the neighbouring villages nobody came at all: they came afterwards, to pick over what was left. Eight years later the Virgin appeared to a peasant on Monte Letho, and the town built her the sanctuary of Montallegro, which the cable car reaches in eight minutes. To her protection the townspeople also credited the fact that the plague of the late sixteenth century, which killed a hundred thousand people in Liguria, left only two suspected cases here; at the next outbreak the captain, less mystical, cut off all exchange with Genoa, Recco, Portofino, Santa Margherita and Chiavari until it had passed.

Then came the season of the art nouveau seafront. Here Nietzsche wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in January 1883; Hemingway put his stay into a story, Cat in the Rain; Ezra Pound lived here for years, and the last king of Lithuania came here to die. In 1920, at villa Spinola, Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes signed the treaty that carries the town's name, and two years later Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union came back to it, to renounce each other's war damages. Into the Italian language, though, Rapallo entered for another reason: rapallizzazione, the way the boom covered the hillside in flats, which Montanelli was among the first to denounce. The boat for Portofino and San Fruttuoso leaves from the doorstep; and locally they say rapallini for those born here, rapallesi for those who merely live here.