Portofino's harbour shelters fewer than four hundred residents, yet the name reaches back to Roman cartography, where it appears as Portus Delphini, the port of dolphins. Pliny the Elder recorded it in the first century. The bay is a drowned valley cut into conglomerate rock, sheltered on three sides and open only to the south. No coastal road of any consequence reaches the village, which is why Genoa to Portofino boat ride tours still trace the water the Romans used. The sea remains the honest approach. Genoa's end of the route was rebuilt within living memory. Porto Antico, the medieval harbour, had silted behind warehouses and customs sheds by the twentieth century. Renzo Piano redrew the waterfront for the 1992 Columbus quincentenary, returning the quays to the city and raising the Bigo, a steel derrick modelled on a ship's crane. Departures for the gita in barca a Portofino now leave from Ponte Spinola, a pier that once handled cargo. Beyond the breakwater stands the Lanterna: 77 metres of masonry, its present tower dating from 1543, the oldest working lighthouse in the Mediterranean and the emblem of the republic that once ruled this coast. East of the mole the route crosses the Golfo Paradiso, water folded into the Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean marine mammals since 1999. Camogli's tall ochre houses were painted in strong colours so that fishermen could pick out their own from open sea. Past Punta Chiappa the land steepens into Monte di Portofino, 610 metres of limestone and pudding stone, protected as a regional park since 1935. On its western flank stands the Abbey of San Fruttuoso, Benedictine in origin, its cloister rebuilt by the Doria family in the thirteenth century and still reachable only on foot or by hull. Seventeen metres below the cove, the bronze Christ of the Abyss has kept its posture since 1954. A Portofino boat tour from Genoa passes all of it in sequence. The village itself is a stage set of narrow façades in ochre, rose and terracotta, many of them trompe-l'œil: painted shutters, painted cornices, painted stone. Castello Brown watches from the headland, a sixteenth-century fortress bought in 1867 by the English consul Montague Yeats-Brown, who planted its terraces with pines and wisteria. Above the piazzetta, the church of San Giorgio guards relics said to have come home from the Crusades. Hollywood arrived in the 1950s; the yachts followed. Yet the geometry has not changed, and a Genoa to Portofino boat ride tour still delivers travellers to the same quay that fishing hulls used, into a harbour best read from the water.