Portofino

Ruby has evaded the evil clutches of her nemesis and made it across the border from the south of France to northern Italy. So far so good. But as I edited the text today I checked the actual location that I’d given for her to wait for Matt’s arrival, and realised that Formia was too far south to be a realistic journey for her to have hitch-hiked in such a short time. So I changed it to Portofino, which is in the Italian Riviera and easily reachable in a less than a day’s drive from France. The only problem is that the coastline in that area is very steep and there are no beaches, and Ruby is meant to spend her time as a beach bum whilst waiting for rescue. But I’ve heard Portofino is a very upmarket village, with a stylish marina, and I thought that might be an interesting environment in which to be homeless for a couple of days.

As ever, Google Street View came into play, since I haven’t been to Portofino before. I zoomed in and landed in the main piazza adjacent to the marina. When the photo came into focus it was like I’d arrived in some kind of heaven. The place is so beautiful I took myself on an immediate Google tour of its roads and backroads, looking at the restaurants, shop windows, and rows of mopeds parked neatly. I could see some toilets and showers in the marina that Ruby would be able to use so that she could look more respectable when begging for scraps of food. I could see the different types of boats in the marina, roadies setting up a stage for a concert in the piazza and pairs of policemen every hundred yards (in keeping with Italy’s policy of intense over-policing – which caused problems for me when I committed various infringements of Italian law in the 1980s by busking, sitting on a step, and, most heinous of all, waiting for a train outside Venice train station).

These photographic details will enable me to write more rich and evocative chapters about this place. Ruby is definitely going to have problems with the level of policing in the village – I’ll have to come up with a way for her to avoid being water cannoned, arrested and ordered to leave the country like I was. Happy days.