Italian Riviera

From Portofino down through the five villages of Cinque Terre and on to the Gulf of Poets, the Ligurian coast has resisted the kind of development that flattened other parts of the Mediterranean. Hotels are small, often thirty rooms or fewer, and the good ones book out by February for the summer. We know which rooms face the water, which restaurants still take a table for a hotel guest at eight in the evening in August, and how to get a boat to Portovenere without the queue. September is the month we recommend most often: the sea is still warm and the day trippers have gone.