Sestri, like all Riviera towns, has a delightful and utterly ritualized social life. Every evening at about 6:30, rather than nap in their hotel rooms, the Italians, who have probably been napping much of the day, take to the zona piedonale, behind the wall of hotels, for a passeggiata. It is understood, somehow, that one only walks counterclockwise, and within certain limits—halfway to the church and then about-face. A trumpet player standing outside a gelateria serenaded us with "Ave Maria" as well as "Yesterday." By and by, it was dinnertime.

The cuisine of Sestri is strictly Ligurian—fish, olive oil, fresh vegetables, pasta in pesto. The Mira, right next to our hotel, serves an exquisite spaghetti alle delizia del mare—the pasta light green from a bath in local olive oil, the dollhouse-scaled shrimp, clams, and mussels still perfumed with brine. After dinner, we joined what I came to think of as the passegelato. Since one is never more than fifty feet from a gelateria in Sestri, the beautiful, slim, golden women cruising up and down the streets consume implausible quantities of ice cream as they go. The crowd begins to thin out around 10:30. By midnight, we could sit on our terrace and hear the occasional whine of a motorbike zipping up and down the beachfront boulevard.

It's not in our nature to hang around pools, so we spent a lot of time on the road. One day, we drove high up into the mountains along dizzying switchbacks to Varese Ligure, the chief town of what is known as the Val di Vara. (A bus also goes there from Sestri.) In the late fifteenth century, the Fieschi, who dominated this part of Liguria, had offered land and protection to any merchant who would build a house in a circle around Varese's market. This principle of urban design never caught on, but many of Varese's townspeople still live in what is known as the Borgo Rotondo, a perfect circle of houses entered by a single archway, and thus protected from intruders in the same way that the Conestoga wagons once were. It is also possible to enjoy a whacking good lunch in the Taverna del Gallo Nero, in Varese's main square.

On another day, we took the twisty, madcap drive into Portofino and immediately understood why the kind of people who can afford anything go there: It's beautiful, it's extremely hard to get to, and it has no beach and so attracts no swimmers. In fact, Portofino has nothing but extremely elegant shops and a broad harborside plaza filled with restaurants and bars. For all the air of flashy luxe, it's just about the most serene spot on the Ligurian coast. We had dinner with a friend from an old Genovese family, and we watched the lights dim over the water and listened to the boats rock gently at anchor while our friend explained to us in the most charming way possible how hopelessly rigid and reactionary the Genovese are.

The Genovese have an odd relationship with the sea. It has been the source of all their wealth and power but also of their vulnerability, and they have turned their backs on it whenever they could. While the eleventh-century merchants erected their towers facing the water, the rich soon began to move up the hill. The streets of the old city were built parallel to the harbor, making access a perennial problem. And the Genovese allowed the old harbor to slide into neglect. But with the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage approaching, city fathers asked Renzo Piano to rehabilitate the port. Piano swept away the vendors and kiosks that had obstructed access to the waterfront, though there was nothing he could do about the overpass constructed in the thoughtless sixties. On the Ponte Spinola pier, he built an aquarium, the largest in Europe, designed to look like the deck of a commercial ship full of containers. Next door, he erected the whimsical Bigo, a nest of white poles that mimic the cranes sprouting all over the harbor; on one of these poles, a glass elevator rises 130 feet in the air, providing a panoramic view of the city. The old harbor also includes a naval museum, a children's museum, a swimming pool on a floating island, two marinas, a playground, and benches set beneath tall palm trees. It is a completely successful exercise in urban renewal, and a potential source of relief for parents whose kids are bored stiff by the Piazza San Matteo.