Ambiente Land

After a couple of frothy, frantic weeks in Rome or Florence, what jaded gent wouldn't relish a respite on the Italian Riviera -- a 200-mile chunk of Technicolor land-and-seascape sprawled out near the top of the boot?

What's so special? Well, in addition to a string of sculptured coves and inlets, olive groves, sleepy fishing towns and rocky, rugged shoreline, the Italian stretch of the Mediterranean shore boasts a precious house specialty known as ambiente, that whoopingly romantic "atmosphere" Italians are always sighing and singing about whenever they're in love, which is a good 78% of the time.

Ambiente comes in abandoned profusion along the Riviera. Which is certainly one reason why the train running commuter husbands from stuffy offices in Genoa, Milan and Turin to wives and mistresses reclining at resorts along this splendid coast is known as the Cornuti, or Cuckolds' Special. Fortunately, the same Cornuti also carries flocks of magnificent Italian womanhood anxious to bask along the beach at Paraggi in Bikinis that might weigh all of two ounces soaking wet. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

We usually head for the Italian Riviera from Paris because we like to eat in Provence on the way south, then blow off steam at Nice and Cannes on the French side of things. But we keep going afterwards, along the Corniche road cut into sandstone cliffs just a few yards above the heaving, cobalt Mediterranean. And we don't stop again until we see the sage green uniforms of the customs men at the Italian frontier.

From then on we amble, stopping wherever fancy seizes us. And fancy, bless her heart, grips pretty often and damned hard, starting right at Ventimiglia, the border town. The place is wallowing in the fragrance of the local (continued on page 82)Ambiente Land(continued from page 51) flower market (huge bunches of blossoms are carried to the car by tattered boys crying "belli fiori, belli fiori"). Ten thousand tons of the posies are produced for perfume essence every year on the sharply terraced farms that climb the hillsides along the coastal road. In fact, flowers spread bright carpets over most of the farmland all the way to Genoa. After that, as the roadside billboards (yeah, they've even got them there) thin out again, it's olive groves all the way to La Spezia.

We don't get that far our first day. At least we never have yet. One reason is a restaurant called La Mórtola, between Ventimiglia and Bordighera. We enter the place through a mist of ilex petals, and the waiter will apologize, "Sempre qui una pioggia di fiori" ("Always here it's raining flowers"). Then we'll pass up the menus loaded with the usual fare from Paris and Rome and ask instead for the local specialties.

Last time, we spent a contemplative hour or so with a bottle of the palest lemon-green coronata from the vineyards of Polcevera, light and pungent and in tune with our morning mood. Later the waiter brought us a ciuppin fish stew that compares well with the French bouillabaise. With it came a more definite white Cinque Terre, a wine Dante and Boccaccio were already raving about back in the 14th Century. Then a wild array of cheeses and cold fresh grapes and figs, followed by a glass of ratafiá, a nut-flavored cordial.

In San Remo, a little further along the coast, you'll want to watch for four things: the Casino, the Royal Hotel, the Rendezvous restaurant and the 13th Century charm of the hilltop Pigna district of darkly narrow lanes and winding flights of stone steps.

Speaking of casinos, the one at San Remo is the only one along this coast that deserves the name. It features the usual Palm Court concerts and balls, and roulette, trente et quarante and baccarat. There are a couple more (at Rapallo and Viareggio) that run to dancing, drinking and gambling during the summer high season; but generally speaking anything else referred to as a casino (with the accent on the "a" rather than on the "i") is likely to feature less licit pleasures.

Beyond San Remo, the road runs through a whole cluster of resorts. Some are big and well known and fairly crowded even in the spring and fall, between the summer infestation of Italians and the winter invasion from northern Europe. Places like Alassio, Loano and Arenzano, for instance. We've got nothing against them; in fact, we like their festive resort life, smart restaurants and nightclubs. But for a place to settle awhile, we'll take the smaller uncommercialized spots like Laigueglia, Noli, Arma di Taggia, Celle Ligure and Varazze, these last two distinguished by mountain torrents running through town and across the beach into the sea.

They're all within easy driving of the brighter resorts for those moments when we feel like champagne and saltimbocca a la Romana or bagna calda with truffles. In fact, the gilt is brighter for the drive there -- past a caravan of Don Camillos on motorcycles, small boys with goats, women with headbaskets of fruit, crumbling amber walls scrawled with Communist slogans and ragged beggars on marble church steps.

But when we're in a vino rosso rather than a champagne mood, we like to be able to stroll down the hilly alleys of a small village, ducking family laundry, nodding to a lilting chorus of buon giornos. We like to find our way to the little trattoria by the harbor and a table lodged on a fishing jetty between a couple of rowboats and a pile of netting. We like to have the padrone bustle out with our wine and our usual plateful of mushrooms piled high, tossed lightly in butter with a touch of garlic and chopped parsley. And when we ask what else is good, he grins: "Quel che non ammazzo ingrassa" ("What doesn't kill you will fatten you").

Take our advice and rent a villa at Noli or in the Bottini quarter of Celle Ligure, amid pinewoods atop a sheer cliff. It runs down to a small beach whose rocky outcroppings capture busy pools of sea-life from the receding tide. Or perhaps you'll want to go on, at least your first trip, to Genoa and beyond to the even more famous stretch of rocky and pebbled beaches of the Riviera di Levante.

Stop briefly en route through bustling Genoa. Take in, if you insist, sights like Christopher Columbus' house. For us, however, the sights of Genoa are in the pulsing, merry life of the streets. The show along these narrow vicoli is a couple of thousand years old now but as lively as ever. Especially so around the docks where there's a bar for every nationality, entertainment for every taste, a racket for every sucker.

Genoese cooking runs mostly to olive oil and a basil-and-cheese sauce called pesto. You'll find it over pasta, inside minestrone and other soups, around burrida fish ragouts and other seafood. We liked its sharp taste once we got used to it. At better restaurants like Olivo or Capurro al Grattacielo, you can get Milanese ossobuco (veal baked on the marrow bone), Neapolitan pizza or Roman fritto misto (of artichokes, brains, sweetbreads, cauliflower and liver soaked in egg, then fried).

At Genoa's Ristorante al Mare we had a steaming bowl of brodetto Rimini, a really terrific fish stew seasoned with saffron, a spinach-tinted lasagne Piedmontese, a huge broiled lobster, then some gorgonzola cheese mashed with butter and eaten with fresh pears. We started with a bottle of light Cortese, chased the final crumbs with biting, orange-flavored strega liqueur.

South and east of Genoa, the coast is more rocky. The Via Aurelia (laid out by Roman legions) dips and winds around tiny coves bright with red and green fishing boats careened on a pebbled slope and dark brown nets hanging out to dry, then through a hilltop village of tree-shaded barnyards and a dray-trafficked church square so peacefully rural it might be a thousand miles from the sea.

We like this stretch because it's still not too far from San Remo's Casino and the citified flesh pots of Genoa. Yet it has tourist-type flesh pots of its own: three utterly lovely but overtouristed resorts -- Rapallo, Santa Margherita Ligure and Portofino.

This last, as an instance of them all, is a visual dream: pink and green and pale blue, saffron and white villas horseshoed around a gleaming green arm of the sea. It has the magnificent Hotel Splendido, with a long terrace overlooking town and bay; it has the Restaurant Pitosforo, whose minestrone is a symphony of condiments. Its seasoning involves onion, garlic, salt, pepper, cayenne, bay leaf, oregano, anchovy paste and on and on. Portofino has a piazza so perfect it might be a stage set, with cafe tables set out in the sunshine under the ilex trees, among boats and lacemakers' stalls and fishermen's nets; it has a castle, up on the headland across from the little harbor; it has some of the clearest water for skin diving (though the underseas grottoes around the islands of Bergeggi and Gallinaria offer a special thrill).

Portofino, in short, is the sort of place you really can't believe even when you get there. But everyone knows it and that's why we stay at Camogli or -- if we can get a villa, because there's no hotel -- at San Fruttuoso nearby. Anyone with half a soul finds Portofino a little hard to take now in any but a visual sense, with its edgy overlay of yatch-borne movie stars, day trippers on conducted tours and Milanese merchants with flashy mistresses. The wine isn't 15¢ a bottle at Portofino anymore and the fishermen's wharfside homes are luxury apartments. The fishermen themselves make their living from tourist trips along the coast.

Rapallo is pretty much the same way, with its lush Restaurant Fausto; so is Santa Margherita with its Helios Terrazza restaurant and its expensive Barracuda and Capo di Nord Est nightclubs.

And even beyond those towns -- to Lerici where Shelley lived and Byron brought other men's wives, to Fiascherino where D. H. Lawrence wrote, San Terenzo where Shelley was cremated on the beach. Porto Venere and Viareggio -- it's still pretty much the Coney Island of Italy.

For us, the best parts of the entire coast (reeking with beautiful garlic-flavored simplicity) are the villages of Cinque Terre. Still almost unknown, although just off one of the most heavily-trampled tourist tracks in Europe, they offer truly unspoiled color: fishing villages where the fishermen really fish, dramatically rugged coasts, tiny sand beaches between tide-washed, moss-green rocks, ambiente by the bucketful.

The secret of their 1200-year isolation is simple: no roads. So you go by train, stopping off en route (if you'll take our advice) at Chiavari, a solemn little industrial town that manufactures most of the things that are sold at a 25% premium in Portofino and Rapallo. Stroll the long arcaded main street for pottery, baskets, sandals, velvets and corduroys, and the nobly smoked prosciutto hams and robiolina cheeses of the district. You could make it a stop on the way back, if you go straight through to Monterosso in an hour and a half by fast train from Genoa or Pisa.

You can take a local to the other villages of Cinque Terre. We usually walk -- first along the seawalls, then up well-made footpaths high above the sea among wild narcissus and violets. We're always struck on the way by the serenity of the peasant women who pass with great flat baskets of grapes and the good-natured friendliness of the men hanging by ropes to tend terraced cliffside vineyards.

There are no shrill auto horns, no telephones, no industry, no goggle-eyed tourists -- nothing except neighbors (which means you, too, if you're staying there) who gather beside the old church, on the sun-drenched piazza, looking down the steeply sloping main street. (The foot of the street is flooded at high tide; at low, the archaic fishing boats lie on their sides along the street not unlike parked cars.)

These villages have a strange history, we learned one evening chatting with the priest at Riomaggiore. Seventh Century Lombard invaders drove the Cinque Terrans from rich inland farms to this then barren coastal strip. Almost literally the people carved their villages into the cliffs, back-carrying soil over the chain of hills to create today's famous vineyards and orchards. Then, in the 14th Century, Turkish raiders killed most of the men and occupied the towns, accounting for the darkly striking good looks of today's Cinque Terrans. For obvious reasons, the Turks never left.

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You'll have more real fun if you keep costs low on the Italian Riviera; and you can live very well indeed on $7 to $10 a day. Fares to Genoa start at $200 to $250 from New York by Italian Line (24 State Street, New York 4) or American Export Line (39 Broadway, New York). The air lines charge around $350, one way. For full information check with your travel agent or Italian State Tourist Office, 21 E. 51st St., New York 22.

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Playboy's International Datebook

Junket in November for men only: South Seas air cruise to the fabled island chains of Tahiti and Fiji, Moon and Sixpence scenery caressed by the trade winds. You can swim or loll in palm-fronded anchorages, embark on out-rigger canoe trips, explore coral lagoons or simply gaze at the belles who inspired Gauguin. The whole undertaking runs 10 days, costs $1000 from Honolulu (Pacific International Tours, 391 Sutter St., San Francisco).

Snow with style is supreme during Quebec's Ice Carnival at the end of January: ice-canoe races on the floes of the St. Lawrence, gigantic ice carvings in the streets, gala costume parties complete with lovely ladies and buttered rum galore. Stay at the superb Chateau Frontenac for a modest $120 per week, including room, all meals, unlimited use of the winter sports facilities at nearby Lac Beauport (Quebec Municipal Tourist Bureau, 60 Rue d' Auteuil, Quebec 4).

Colorful, still untouristed "out islands" of the Bahamas are a top choice for a lazy, sunny November rest. Take a sample on a four-day yacht-plane combination from Tampa to Nassau, then on to Eleuthera for about $80 (Mackey Airlines, Broward County Int. Airport, Fort Lauderdale). Or fly from Nassau to Harbour Island for $9.30, then sozzle, swim or loaf at Pink Sands Lodge for $32 a day for two (Bahamas Airways, Ltd., Oakes Field, Nassau: Pink Sands Lodge, Harbour Island, Bahamas).