Portovenere: The Cave Where Byron Swam and the Water Turns a Colour That Has No Name

At the very tip of the Portovenere promontory there is a cave half-submerged in the sea. Inside, sunlight passes through shallow water and reflects off white limestone walls, and the water turns a shade of luminous green that the Italians call verde smeraldo — emerald green — but which is really something beyond naming. Lord Byron was so enchanted by this cave that he swam four kilometres across the bay from it to visit Percy and Mary Shelley in Lerici. The locals still call it the Grotta di Lord Byron. A few years later, Shelley drowned in the same gulf when his boat was caught in a sudden squall. The Romantic poets came here looking for beauty and the sublime. They found both.

Portovenere sits at the southern end of the Ligurian coast, just south of the Cinque Terre, where the coastline turns dramatically and the sea deepens quickly. The village is essentially one long medieval street — Via Capellini — lined with tall, narrow tower-houses painted in the same faded multicolour palette as Procida: ochre, terracotta, pale blue, cream. The street ends at the Church of San Pietro, a striped black-and-white Gothic church perched on the very tip of the promontory above Byron's cave. From its terrace on a clear day you can see the islands of Palmaria, Tino, and Tinetto arranged offshore like stepping stones toward open water.

The Romans knew this place. They called it Portus Veneris — the Port of Venus — and built a temple to the goddess on the exact rocky outcrop where the Church of San Pietro stands today. The church was built in the 4th century, directly on the temple's foundations. In the 12th century, the Genoese built their great fortress above the village, and the defensive walls still run along the ridge. Portovenere is a UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside the Cinque Terre — but it draws a fraction of the crowds that descend on Riomaggiore or Vernazza, which is one of several things that make it better.

The Romantic poets who gathered here in the 1820s gave the bay its enduring name: the Golfo dei Poeti — Gulf of Poets. Shelley and Mary Godwin lived at Lerici on the opposite shore; Byron visited often. In July 1822, Shelley drowned when his boat Don Juan was caught in a squall returning from Livorno. His body washed ashore near Viareggio ten days later. Byron attended the cremation on the beach. The light here in the late afternoon — golden, angled, filtering through umbrella pines — looks like a painting made by someone who had already seen too much beauty and was trying to hold onto it.