Genoa, hub of the Riviera, spreads between the dark Apennines and the green Ligurian Sea – so it’s balmy, with fancy palms, geometric gardens and window ledges of geraniums. Begin a day’s pottering by the port, where ferries dock from Barcelona, Sardinia, Sicily and Tunisia. The sea can send in thick mists, but in the Old Town, sunshine lights the saffron facades – you’ll end up meandering for hours, from rainbow fruit stands to fish stalls piled with prawns like translucent coral.

From the town of Rapallo, a ‘cableway excursion’ (£7 return) ascends to a curious refuge: the Santuario Basilica di Nostra Signora di Montallegro, high on a remote outcrop. The carriages have all the comfort of sardine cans, but the ride is a real showstopper: red tiles falling away to olive groves and slopes of cork oaks. In 15 minutes you’re disembarking to a vast view of sea blurring with sky, and pink-and-white towns sprinkled in the folds of distant mountains.

Set to a soundtrack of Vespas, Santa Margherita Ligure is 24-carat Italian Riviera, with ice-cream parlours among palms, and dolly-mixture hotels on a bay. Best approach is by ferry from Portofino, on deck, maxing your tan. On the 25-minute bounce around the Gulf of Tigullio, the waters are space-blue, washing headlands clad in myrtle, heather and chestnut, masking castellos and palazzos. It’s a budget Onassis moment – and it’s priceless.

HISTORY-BOOK

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Portofino is perfection, like a fishing village in a pop-up book, and crowning it is Castello Brown (entry £3), an ancient outlook resembling a chess-set piece high on the headland. It’s a king-of-the-castle spot, with shady chambers and sensational views. History batted it between Milanese viscounts, people with names like ‘The Magnificent Ambrogio Grimaldi Cebà’ – even one Bonaparte, who kindly renamed Portofino ‘Porto Napoleon’. But it was Montague Yeats Brown, an English Consul in Genoa, who fell for it in 1867 and made it the attraction it is today, which explains the daft, Pythonesque name.

At some stage, in the sooty heart of Genoa, you’ll find the Cathedral of San Lorenzo (Piazza San Lorenzo; free): guarded by stone lions, its huge, humbug-striped facade looks shoe-horned into the tiny square. Inside, there’s a Byzantine fresco of The Last Judgement, tutti-frutti Baroque paintings all over the altar, bosomy statues in the Chapel of St John the Baptist and, in the Treasury (£4), a minuscule gold rendering of his decapitated head.

On a clear day you can see Corsica from the Santuario Basilica di Nostra Signora di Montallegro (www.santuariomontallegro.com; free) – a retreat of Romanesque arches, served by the cable car from Rapallo. In what sounds like a surreal scene from a Fellini movie, the Signora revealed herself to a peasant here in 1557 and a church was founded to honour the cult of the Virgin. It lives on in lurid electric candles and photo-booth snaps left by pilgrims on walls.

See how the other half once summered at Villa Durazzo (00 39 018 529 3135, www.villadurazzo.it; £5), a 17th-century palazzo in Santa Margherita Ligure, among citrus orchards and palms. Over the years the showy Durazzos glitzed it up, using top Genovese craftsmen, while piling on paintings and Venetian chandeliers. But it’s a sedate escape, with an outdoor cafe – and a reminder that bling has heritage. Perhaps that’s why Wayne Rooney and Coleen wed here.

Armani isn’t the only famous Giorgio to patronise Portofino. When crusaders returned from the Holy Land in 1100, they brought relics of St George, stashing them in the Chiesa di San Giorgio. Stepping into the plain white interior offers cool refuge, the only illumination blue sky through a fanlight, and afterwards you can study the headstones in the Protestant grotto within the Catholic cemetery – Werner Fallhaber, born Jewish, Dresden, 1927, died Protestant, Portofino, 1953 – and wonder what lured others here.

WHERE TO STAY

NO EXPENSE SPARED

Hotel Splendido, Salita Baratta 16, Portofino (00 39 018 526 7801, www.hotelsplendido.com). Liguria’s prettiest port is full-on lovers’ territory, which goes some way to explaining the rates at this 64-room former monastery. It is, however, a spectacularly positioned one-off, with a dinner terrace looking down on the kind of palmy views and calm waters that feature as backdrops in Renaissance paintings. Doubles from £700, B&B.

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