The Story Begins ....

PORTOFINO

"And there, all of a sudden, shows up a hidden cove of olive and chestnut trees. A little village, Portofino spreads out like a moon arch around these still waters. We slowly cross the narrow passage that links the sea to this wonderful natural harbor and venture into the amphitheater of the houses surrounded by a powerfully fresh and green wood, and everything is reflected in the mirror of these calm waters, where fishing boats sleep". (Guy de Maupassant)

For many years, a man called Roy Gardener lived in this house. He kept bees locally and a sign outside his shed stated that he sold honey here. We wanted to celebrate Roy and his bees, but have been unable to find out anything about him other than his name. We did discover that many queen bees in the area are imported from Italy, and that the Italian honeybee is Apis mellifera ligustica. In trying to choose a name for the house, we wanted not only to honour the beekeeping career of its former owner, but also to capture Erowal Bay’s spirit as a coastal village. So we decided to call the house after another town that encapsulates the ideal of sunshine, fishing, relaxing and generally enjoying life: Portofino, on Italy’s Ligurian coast, where the Italian Honey Bee originates.

According to Pliny the Elder, the town of Portofino was founded by the Roman Empire with the name Portus Delphini, perhaps for the presence of many dolphins in the Tigullio Gulf. This is an important reference point because for several months over the summer of 2012-13, a female dolphin lived in St George’s Basin just off Erowal Bay, and was befriended by locals and visitors alike.

We also wanted the house be called after a place with a significant cultural history. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Portofino attracted many important residents and visitors, both literary and otherwise.

 In the spring of 1953, Truman Capote made his entrance in Portofino in a red Renault accompanied by Jack Dunphy, his lifetime companion, and a noisy couple of dogs. Together they rented an apartment over the Delfino Restaurant, on the top floor with a grand terrace, and there they stayed until the end of October.

Capote was born in New Orleans in 1924. When he took this long vacation he was already a celebrity, known in his country for his gifts as a brilliant writer and for his intemperate and transgressive life. He had his literary debut in 1948 with the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, followed the next year by a collection of short stories entitled a Tree in the Night and in 1951 by the novel The Grass Harp. By 1953 he had already written for the theatre and for the cinema.

He came to Portofino with the intention of working in peace and quiet on the screenplay for The House of Flowers, and at the same time on a project for a new collection of short stories. The distractions of summer proved to be many however, and he let a good part of the time slip by.

At the same time, in Portofino, there were many gatherings of a whole slew of friends and celebrities. Some, like Noel Coward and John Gielgud were staying with Rex Harrison and his wife Lilly Palmer. Others, like Tennessee Williams, the celebrated dramatist and author of among other works The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Streetcar Named Desire and Paul Bowles, the famous composer, who with his wife lane were portrayed in the film Tea in the Desert by Bertolucci, were just passing through.

It was above all with Cecil Beaton that Capote spent most of his time. Older then Capote by twenty years, Beaton was tall, thin, with silver hair, and was considered the personification of English refinement, the arbiter elegantiarum of London since the 1930′s when he became the preferred portrait photographer for the rich and socially prominent on both sides of the Atlantic.

Together they must have appeared a strange couple. As much as Cecil was distinct and elegant, Truman had an almost wild primitive look. Everyone describes him during this vacation like a little boy, bleached blond hair, dirty, with long fingernails, and always in bermuda shorts which at that time weren’t in fashion. Together, they frolicked in the water, lay in the sun, and above all they talked and talked. The vacation proved very stimulating for Truman, to the extent that it became a true spiritual enrichment.

The town of Portofino also has a connection with the television show, Downton Abbey.  Highclere Castle in Berkshire, England, where it is filmed, has been the ancestral seat of the Carnarvon earldom since 1679. But this is not the only great house that the earls of Carnarvon have owned. There was at least one other - in Italy. Named Villa Altachiara, it was built near Portofino in 1874 by the 4th Earl of Carnarvon (1831-1890). More than a century later, the 40-room villa was the scene of an unsolved mystery, so baffling that some believe the deadly vengeance of an ancient ruler was to blame.

Affectionately called ‘Twitters' by his family because of his nervous twitches, the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, was a prominent politician and leading member of the UK Conservative Party. Serving twice as secretary of state for the Colonies, he had very progressive ideas about the independence of Canada and Australia, then British colonies. For a period, he was also lord lieutenant of Ireland. Like other members of his family before him, he travelled widely, but prompted by concern for the delicate health of his young son and heir, George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, born in London on June 26, 1866, he decided to build his family's holiday retreat in Italy on a promontory overlooking the picturesque seaside town of Portofino in Liguria.

When his father died in 1890, George Herbert became the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, but he was known simply as Lord Carnarvon. He inherited not only the title but also Highclere Castle and Villa Altachiara. An inveterate traveller like his forebear, this tall, gangly aristocrat was an accomplished sailor, a sport he learnt boating in the waters off Portofino. He loved horses, and after establishing the celebrated Highclere Stud, he became a steward at Newbury racecourse when it was founded in 1905. 

In 1895, on his 29th birthday, Lord Carnarvon married Almina Victoria Maria Alexandra Wombwell, the daughter of Marie Baye and, apparently, of her husband, Frederick Charles Wombwell. It is, however, more than probable that she was the illegitimate daughter of Alfred Rothchild (1842-1918) of the wealthy banking dynasty, who throughout the couple's married life generously supplemented their income, often seconding their whims or paying off the earl's debts.

In 1901, while indulging in his love of driving around Europe in his race car, Lord Carnarvon had a near-fatal accident in Germany that left him with a permanent limp and badly injured lungs. Acting on doctor's advice to winter in a dryer and warmer place than England, he chose Egypt as his destination. To while away the time there-and because it was then fashionable-he decided to take up Egyptology as a hobby. He oversaw the concession he had been granted in the Valley of the Kings but soon realised he needed professional help with the excavations. Through a friend, he was introduced to the English archaeologist Howard Carter. The rest is history. With Lord Carnarvon's financial backing, incremented by Rothchild's money, and Carter's expertise, the two men collaborated from 1906 until 1922. In what was to be their last season digging, they discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, the richest burial site ever found. Regrettably, Lord Carnarvon would never get to see the work completed. On April 5, 1923, he died at the Continental-Savoy Hotel in Cairo from an infected mosquito bite. His sudden death so soon after the tomb had been opened, kindled the myth that he was cursed by the young pharaoh for disturbing his eternal peace.

On January 8, 2001, this myth resurfaced, when Countess Francesca Vacca Agusta, the 58-year old former model and widow of the Italian helicopter magnate Corrado Agusta, died tragically. Believed to have fallen from the terrace of Villa Altachiara, where she lived, her body washed up on the French coast three weeks later, some 370 kilometres from Portofino. Many aspects of the case remain unexplained and, although the coroner ruled her death was accidental, intrigue surrounds it, and there are those who still ask whether it was something more, namely, suicide or murder, that led to her demise. According to press reports, her brother believes it was a homicide.

Since 2009, all attempts to sell Villa Altachiara to pay off the unfortunate countess's unpaid taxes have failed. No one appears too willing to perturb King Tut or make him angry again.

Then there is the book, Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, and its 1991 film version. Von Arnim was born in Australia, grew up in England, married a German Count in 1890, lived in Pomerania and became a prolific, much respected writer. Debts forced her husband to sell his estate and move to England in 1908. He died two years later. Elizabeth, first in Switzerland and then in England, hobnobbed with major literary figures, married, in 1916, the second Earl Russell (Bertrand Russell¹s brother), soon left, then divorced him. She lived in America, Switzerland, London and the French Riviera. She died in the U.S.A. in 1941, at age 75.

In 1921 she rented a medieval castello in Portofino, Italy, and there she wrote a novel, The Enchanted April(1922) about four women who, in the early 1920s, find (or find again) romance and themselves during a one-month spring holiday in an Italian castle just like Elizabeth's. The movie is not only a faithful adaptation of the book but it was filmed in the country house (Castello Brown) where Elizabeth had stayed.