Liguria has an image problem: everyone knows it from the land. For most people Portofino means a traffic jam on the narrow road from Santa Margherita and a crowd on the little square; the Cinque Terre means a packed regional train and a queue at the viewpoint in Manarola. Yet this coast was built from the sea and only makes sense from that side — villages that face the water, harbours deeper than the beaches, churches placed on headlands so that people sailing past would see them. That is why I come back here with clients every season. This time the boat was M/Y FAST — a 2025 Ferretti 860, 27 metres, factory-fresh: eight guests in four cabins, four crew, a Studio Zuccon interior in hand-stitched leather, a full-beam aft terrace and a flybridge from which you can take in an entire gulf at once. We boarded in Genoa, in the shadow of the old port, and headed east.
Day 1 — Genoa and a first evening off Camogli
Embarkation in Genoa → Golfo Paradiso, at anchor off Punta Chiappa
We came aboard in the early afternoon. Genoa is a city that makes no effort to charm anyone — Italy's oldest maritime republic, the port Columbus sailed from, and a maze of alleys so narrow the sun reaches them for about fifteen minutes a day. We had a late lunch in the old town, came back with a bag of focaccia straight from the oven, and put to sea. I never go far on the first evening: twelve miles east, around the Portofino headland, and the anchor down in the Golfo Paradiso off Punta Chiappa. We sat on the aft deck with an Aperol Spritz and watched Camogli switch its lights on — a town of houses painted ochre, pink and mustard, seven storeys high, because the fishermen built upwards once they ran out of room along the shore. The chef served dinner on the aft terrace: fresh seafood from the Genoa market, raw red prawns from Santa Margherita, fried calamari. Nobody suggested going back into port.
Day 2 — The abbey with no road to it
Punta Chiappa → San Fruttuoso → Paraggi bay → Portofino
I was up at first light and did what I do on every charter: coffee and the flybridge. The sea flat as a sheet of glass, the Portofino cliff still black against a sky only beginning to lift, and that boundless calm you cannot buy ashore at any price. After breakfast we moved down to San Fruttuoso — a cove cut into a steep wooded slope with no road leading to it. You can walk over the mountains or arrive by boat, and that is the whole list. On the beach, a few metres from the water, stands a tenth-century Benedictine abbey with a stone dome and the tombs of the Doria family. Seventeen metres below the surface stands Christ of the Abyss, a bronze figure with open arms, placed there in 1954 in memory of those who never came back from the sea. We went in by tender, saw the abbey, returned aboard, and after lunch ran the few miles to Paraggi. It is the only real beach in this stretch, and the water there has that indecently bright turquoise that looks like it has been pushed up on a phone. We went down off the platform and simply swam — no jet skis, no toys; water like that needs nothing added. In the evening we came into Portofino.
Day 3 — Portofino from the right side
Portofino → Castello Brown → San Giorgio → at anchor off Punta del Faro
Portofino has one of the most photographed piazzettas in the world and, surprisingly, still deserves it. The secret is the hour. In the morning, before the coaches arrive, it is still a small fishing village: thirty coloured facades around a horseshoe of harbour, a few boats, silence. We walked up to Castello Brown, which looks down on the whole bay, and then out to the little church of San Giorgio on the point — from the terrace above the saint's tomb the sea looks like a chart. On the way back down, this series' compulsory ritual in its Ligurian form: ice cream from the gelateria by the piazzetta, eaten sitting on the wall, watching the yachts lying stern-to. We spent the afternoon under the lighthouse at Punta del Faro, at anchor in water so clear you could follow the chain to the bottom. Dinner was served on deck: fresh sea bass baked in salt and trofie with pesto, which in Liguria is made with basil from Prà and genuinely does taste different from anywhere else.
From my experience as a broker: this is a coast where “we'd like to stop in Portofino” and “we are in Portofino” are separated by several weeks of lead time. The harbour has a few dozen berths, in July and August they are allocated well in advance, and around the headland there is a marine protected area with zones where anchoring is restricted or banned — you lie to a buoy, with permission. Exactly the same applies, only more strictly, in the Cinque Terre. So on this route you do not plan “we'll go wherever it looks nice”: you build the week around berth availability and protected zones, and you book earlier than you book the flight. That is the part of the puzzle I take on — and the part that most often decides whether a week looks like this logbook or like watching the best bays from two miles off.
Day 4 — The Bay of Silence
Portofino → Sestri Levante (Baia del Silenzio) → Punta Manara
On the fourth day we carried on east, twelve miles to Sestri Levante — a town built on an isthmus so narrow it has a bay on either side of a single street. The eastern one is the Baia delle Favole, the Bay of Fairytales, because Andersen once spent a few weeks here. The western one is the Baia del Silenzio, the Bay of Silence: a half-circle of sand closed off by coloured houses standing with their feet in the water. We anchored outside, went in by tender, walked the old town and came back for a late swim. In the afternoon we moved on to Punta Manara — a wild headland with olive groves running down to the water and not a single building — and stayed there until dusk. That was the day nobody asked where we were going tomorrow.
Day 5 — Five villages from the deck
Sestri Levante → Monterosso → Vernazza → Manarola
This is where the Ferretti showed what the three engines are for: twenty-odd miles to Monterosso took us until lunch rather than half a day. The Cinque Terre look nothing from the water like they do from the train. Monterosso is the widest and most town-like, with a proper beach and the best anchovies on this coast — salted fish that here has been raised to the status of a starter. From the sea, Vernazza looks like something that could not be built: a natural harbour basin cut into the rock, an eleventh-century watchtower above it, houses stacked vertically one on another. Manarola is pure geometry — a cascade of houses sliding down to the water with no harbour at all. We ran slowly along the shore, anchored where anchoring is allowed, and swam under a cliff on which people have been building vineyard terraces by hand for a thousand years. For dinner the crew brought back white Cinque Terre wine and sciacchetrà, the sweet one made from dried grapes. In the evening the lights of the five villages came on one after another along the whole cliff.
On the Italian Riviera everything worth seeing faces the sea. From the land you are looking at this coast from behind.
— Tomasz Wrzesiński, yacht broker, Monaco
Day 6 — Portovenere and the Gulf of Poets
Manarola → Palmaria and Byron's Grotto → Portovenere → Lerici
The sixth day is the one you come here for. Twelve miles south-east and you round the point straight onto Portovenere — a town that from the water looks like stage scenery: a row of narrow, many-storeyed houses in ochre and pink, the Genoese fortress above them, and at the very end of the rock spit the black-and-white church of San Pietro, built in the thirteenth century on the site of a Roman temple of Venus. We first ran through the channel between the shore and the island of Palmaria and stopped at Byron's Grotto — the cave from which, so the story goes, Byron set off to swim the whole gulf to Lerici to see Shelley. Hence the name: Golfo dei Poeti, the Gulf of Poets. A swim here was compulsory and nobody argued: warm, azure water, open sea on one side, walls on the other. In the evening we crossed to the far side of the gulf to Lerici, below the castle above the harbour, and that was this week's moment of real magic: you come in at sunset, the whole coast turns orange, and the castle of Lerici and the fortress of Portovenere look at each other from opposite ends of the gulf, exactly as the Genoese laid it out eight hundred years ago. Dinner: muscoli, the local La Spezia mussels, and grilled fish.
Day 7 — An easy run back west
Lerici → Golfo Paradiso → Genoa
The last day is the longest run of the week, but the morning looked exactly like the six before it: coffee on the flybridge, a sea like glass, the Gulf of Poets still in the shadow of the mountains. We went west at an easy pace, passed the Cinque Terre from offshore — at that distance the five villages look like five smudges of coloured plaster on a grey cliff — and around lunchtime stopped once more in the Golfo Paradiso for a last swim off Punta Chiappa. After that it was sun loungers, books and Genoa growing slowly on the horizon with its Lanterna, the lighthouse that has been guiding sailors since 1128. We came in during the late afternoon, tanned and suspiciously quiet. Lifting my bag off FAST's deck I thought that this is the coast with the worst ratio in yachting of fame to the number of people who have actually seen it.
What it costs, and what you should know
M/Y FAST — Ferretti 860, built 2025, 27 metres, 8 guests in 4 cabins (3 doubles + 1 twin), 4 professional crew, interior by Studio Zuccon International Project, aft terrace and flybridge, full toy garage with a Williams 395 tender, Seabob, jet ski, kayak and SUP — charters in the range of €60,000–€70,000 per week for the 2026 season (the lower figure outside the peak, the higher one in high summer), plus APA of roughly €18,000–€21,000, plus VAT and port fees. Rates vary by period and I always confirm the current one before booking. APA is an advance against running costs — fuel, provisioning, marinas, port dues — reconciled to the euro at the end of the week. FAST's cruising area is the Italian Riviera and the Amalfi Coast, so the same boat covers both this week and Capri and Positano.
Something you will not find in the brochure: Liguria is short. The entire coast is under seventy miles from Genoa to Lerici, so a week here is not about covering distance — it is about being in each of these bays at the right hour: Portofino in the morning, the Cinque Terre in the afternoon, Portovenere at sunset. The same route in the wrong order is the same yacht and an entirely different holiday. With a specific boat and a specific week, judging what goes where is my job. You have the map; a guide is still worth having.
Want to actually sail this route? FAST works the Italian Riviera and the Amalfi Coast. Tell me when you are going and who with — I will check availability and berths and build the week around you. See this charter →
Enquiries: tomek@wyachts.com | WhatsApp +33 6 72 85 87 30 — Tomasz Wrzesiński, W Yachts Monaco.