Portovenere: Where Byron Swam and the Sea Turns Emerald

There is a cave at the very tip of the Portovenere promontory, half-submerged, opening directly onto the sea, where the light does something extraordinary: the water inside turns a shade of luminous green that has no precise name in English. The Italians call it verde smeraldo — emerald green — and it is caused by the sunlight passing through the shallow water and reflecting off the white limestone walls. Lord Byron was so enchanted by this cave that he swam across the entire bay from it to visit Percy and Mary Shelley in Lerici, a distance of about four kilometres. The locals still call it the Grotta di Lord Byron.

Portovenere sits at the southern end of the Ligurian coast, just south of the Cinque Terre, at a point where the coast turns dramatically from north-south to east-west and the sea deepens quickly. The village is essentially one long street — Via Capellini — lined with tall, narrow medieval tower-houses painted in the same faded multicolour palette as Procida. 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 the open sea.

The Romans knew this place. They called it Portus Veneris — the Port of Venus — and had a temple here dedicated to the goddess, which stood 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 the great castle above the village as a naval fortress, and the town's defensive walls still run along the ridge. Portovenere is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site, grouped with the Cinque Terre and the three offshore islands — but it gets a fraction of the crowds that descend on Riomaggiore or Vernazza.

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 in Lerici, on the opposite shore; Byron at the Villa Durazo in Albaro, near Genoa, but visited often. Shelley drowned in this gulf in 1822 when his boat was caught in a sudden squall returning from visiting Leigh Hunt at Livorno. His body washed ashore near Viareggio ten days later. Byron attended the cremation on the beach. The gulf that the Romantic poets turned into a literary landscape now bears their collective memory in its name. The light here in the late afternoon — golden, angled, filtering through the umbrella pines — looks like something from a painting.