We returned to the village one evening for dinner, walking past the boccie game and a group of people in lawn chairs among the boats, along a tiny footpath cut into the rock, and into Santa Chiara, a restaurant perched on the end of a pier. We sat out on the terrace and watched the waves crash into the beach and the lights from a trattoria across the way sparkle on the water. We felt our first cool breeze after days of blazing heat; Alex kept threatening to jump over the wall and take a dip. We held him down and looked out toward the big ships slowly crossing the horizon; the city, which was just at our back, seemed to fall away. Here was the ancient Genoa of ships and sea. It was all kind of dreamy.

When the waiter came, he did not give us a menu; he said, "Do you want an antipasto?" We did. He brought marinated anchovies in light-green Ligurian olive oil; then he brought a warm salad of baby shrimp, clams, and I-didn't-know-what; then spaghetti delizie de mare served directly from the pot, and apparently directly from the sea, and grilled orata (sea bream). It was the classic Genovese cucina povera—simple, light, fresh, and intensely local. By the time we finished dinner, it was 10:30 and the kids from the adjacent neighborhood had poured into the piazza to flirt, hang out on the stairs, and line up at the Antico Gelateria. We left in order to get in line; the same people were still sitting among the boats, but now they had fallen into a companionable silence.

It is, of course, this small-town warmth and insularity that gives so many Italian cities, including Rome, their special charm. But Genoa is, in its own way, a quality-of-life capital. In the winter, skiing is only an hour away, and the Riviera starts virtually where the city ends. In fact, a visitor—especially one with kids—could stay on the beach and commute into Genoa. We would never have parted with our beloved Bristol Palace, but we also spent three days in the charming little town of Sestri Levante, about an hour south of Genoa.

Sestri is set up the way most Riviera towns are: beach, crowded main drag, solid wall of hotels and cafés, and then shops in the interior. It is about as close as you can get to city life and still be on the beach. Italians are city-lovers, and, as far as I can tell, when they take a beach vacation the only thing they want to get away from is shade. We arrived in Sestri in the middle of the afternoon, and were sent across the street to our hotel's very own private handkerchief of beach. There we found hundreds of fabulous-looking people lying stretched out side by side like sardines in a can. A few of them had ventured into the water up to their ankles, the better to chat. And then they would go back to tan; only teenagers and children actually swam.

We stayed in the Villa Balbi, a seventeenth-century palazzo with a pink-painted facade that had been built by the Brignoles, one of the great Genovese families of the Baroque period. The villa is on Sestri's main drag, as are virtually all of the town's hotels. On the other side of this buzzing, rackety thoroughfare is the beach. This does not, it must be said, correspond to most Americans" idea of a beach vacation. But the Villa Balbi's walled garden offers shelter from the noise, the crowds, the street, and the heat. In the mornings, Buffy and I would have breakfast—meat, cheese, fruit, Genovese pandolce—beneath the immense canopy of an ancient camphor tree, while Alex lay in bed reading his Sandy Koufax biography. The Villa Balbi also has its own pool—a rarity in Sestri—and since Alex quickly befriended a few English kids (Sestri has a fair number of British tourists, though virtually no Americans), we were able to avoid the beach altogether.