LAND OF POETS, SEAFARERS AND GOURMETS

“The Ligurians belong to two categories: there are the ones so attached to their homeland like limpets to a rock that you could never move them and there are those for whom the world is their home and wherever they are, they feel at home. But even the second, and I am one of them… regularly return home and remain attached to their country no less than the first”. This was written in 1962 by one of the major Italian writers, of San Remo adoption, Italo Calvino, in his memoirs, competing in paying tribute to his origins with another Ligurian writer, Noble prize for literature in 1975, Eugenio Montale.

And, regarding the Ligurian coast, the centre of cult of the Belle Époque, populated as it was with old Englishmen, Russian grand dukes, eccentrics and cosmopolitans, two young American writers, Tennessee Williams e Francis Scott Fitzgerald, were so stricken as to set their most passionate love stories there. Someone else instead was so inspired by the beautiful silver landscape of the olive leaves as to call the Pdo extra virgin olive oil “Riviera Ligure”.

The import from the Americas of some of the products that have become fundamental for the Italian cuisine: tomatoes, beans and potatoes, the latter the base for the Polesine and Valtellina polenta, is due to the most famous of Genoveses, Cristoforo Colombo. And Giuseppe Mazzini, who united Italy, another great Ligurian, toasted the enterprise with Cinque Terre wine, one of the 7 controlled denomination wines of the region, to which 2 Igt quality (Colline Savonesi and Golfo dei Poeti) should be added.