continued

T WAS only a little spoiled by tourists, but perhaps I should rephrase that. It hadn't been spoiled per se: like many parts of Italy, the locals have hung on for dear life to their culture, limiting their use of any foreign tongue and tolerating the tourists that had ventured down here in their automobiles.
   Portovenere still sported its village façade, facing the sea in tones of orange and yellow, buildings piled precariously along the hillside like too-tall afterthoughts—and not naturally tied to the earth like statues of Egyptian gods coming out of the cliffs. Some of the buildings had been standing since the twelfth century while others were more novel, dating from the sixteenth. The recipes had not changed and the village cat, Gagea, still got fed at the Trattoria da Iseo, loved by every member of its staff. Tourists were plentiful and paid city prices for car parking in Portovenere, but overall this was a real Italian seaside town, with one road in and quintessentially romantic. It had weathered not only these tourists but the innovations that came before: cars, for starters. The road leading in was single-lane either way; there were no immediate ways to get there via autostrada; this town was well hidden.
   Only the minimal concessions had been made: acceptance of credit cards and euros, for instance, but Portovenere had entered the 21st century with its soul intact, warm and happy that it enjoyed the Mediterranean sun all year and not, as was the case for me and those other visitors with foreign number plates, from hours to weeks.
   I knew it was not spoiled because this was not a parody of a tourist stop. Some places try to be too Italian. Those working around the Duomo know what I mean: more foreigners than locals frequented the stores and there are plenty of overpriced goods with Italian labels that aren't usually found in out-of-the-place villages. The red and yellow Ms that signified the metropolitana were as plentiful as red and yellow Ms that signified McDonald's restaurants, the only non-Italian concession in the centre of Milano.
   Italian cuisine was "the business" in my previous Stockholm home, so here was the chance to sample the real thing on location. Seafood does not get better than in a seaside town. Lunch had been less memorable in Milano, though happily buoyed by meeting our local representative and the outstanding, outgoing service of the waiters, who communicated as much by voice as by pleasant pats on the back.
   Bringing my mind back to Portovenere, where there were no non-Italian restaurants, I ordered a seafood spaghetti (after having the varieties explained to me—particularly good advice to take), remarking to my waiter at the Iseo that it symbolized the Silk Road that linked our two cultures, hinting that Marco Polo had taken the recipe for noodles with him on one of his journeys. The remark went unnoticed.
   But it was a memorable meal. Spaghetti does taste better here, I thought, just as Chinese food tastes better in China. It is a rarity to experience this: in New Zealand, almost everything tastes better than their original counterparts because of the fresher ingredients on hand, particularly fruit and vegetables that did not taste like chemically fertilized soil. I had grown up with that experience. Seafood was indeed fresh, as I noted a fishing boat return for the day as a boatload of tourists headed in the opposite direction for the last circuit before the sun set. But service in Milano had been better and very Italian; here they were quite ready to go home but for the long summer days that kept the tourists coming. And there was no hiding the fact that I was a tourist. Only Gagea would get round-the-clock treatment.
   'There is another place from the same owner,' my waiter told me. 'It is on the island over there.' His English was better than my Italian. But I lacked the time to go. I could either return to the autostrada or find another Cinque Terre town, stopping in an Italian town on my week off, or I could return to my usual and familiar surroundings in France. Having been in Switzerland the day before, where I had been hampered by being outside the European Union and the absence of a laptop-friendly phone service, I decided that it would be too tough to strain myself to follow Italian and attempt to speak it. This was my vacation before London. I came here to relax. And, after all, I had sampled a taste of Italy by staying in part of Italian Switzerland. I would forgo the famous Church of San Pietro which I spied earlier or walk among the monastery and the spot where Byron dived on his swim across the Gulf of Poets.
   Telling the waiter, 'Grazie,' and paying with my American Express card, I resolved myself to drive to the old French border and cut some shapes with the Grimaldis—though they had probably skipped town because of the thought of tourists doing Grace Kelly homages, 50 years after High Noon. But at least I would be on familiar soil, speaking my third rather than my sixth language, and swore I would return here if I had more than a week off. Take away the buildings and oh-so-real seaside air, it would still be worth it for the food alone. • Jack Yan

Jack Yan is founding publisher of Lucire.