The house
Built in the 1780s.
Wrong since 1811.
The sundial
The dial that runs ten minutes fast
It is painted on the south facade, above the second floor, high enough that you have to step back into the lane to read it properly. The shadow crosses the numbers from about eight in the morning until the roof opposite takes the sun away. In January it is long and moves slowly. In July you can watch it pass a number while you finish a coffee.
It has been about ten minutes fast since 1811 and nobody in the family has corrected it. Guests work it out on the second morning, usually at breakfast. We tell them the truth, which is that the house has been early for two hundred years and there is no good reason to stop now. The line at the top of this page keeps time the same way. It reads the hour in Camogli, not the hour where you are sitting.
The palazzo
A ship-owner’s house from the 1780s
It was built for a man who owned boats, which explains the staircase. It is wider than a house this size needs, slate underfoot, with a brass rail worn pale in the middle, and it turns twice before it lets you see the water. Everything above the ground floor was arranged around that view. The windows at the front are deep enough to sit in.
Camogli builds upward because there is nowhere to build outward, so the house is narrow and tall and painted the colour the whole harbour front is painted. Some of what you see on the facade is not there. The cornices above the top windows are paint, and so is one of the shutters. It is a local habit and a very old one. The sundial is the only thing on that wall that does any work.
The family
Eleven rooms became six
Three generations ran the house as a pensione. Eleven rooms, a bathroom at the end of each landing, and a book by the door that guests signed on their way out. The family reopened it in 2021 with six rooms instead of eleven, which is the largest change anyone has made here in a long time. The space the other five gave up went into the ones that stayed.
The kitchen works the way it always has. There is no fixed menu. There is what the boats brought in and what the market had that morning, cooked by one person for four tables. And there is one rule, which somebody will tell you about before you have put your bag down.
The rule
The rule the family set when the house reopened in 2021.
The rooms