Arrival In Monteriggi
The ferry from Sestri Levante was the small one, the tub they used in the off-season when the hydrofoil did not run, and it smelled of diesel and old rope and the particular resignation of coastal boats in October. Giulia stood on the foredeck with her laptop bag pulled tight against her hip and watched the coastline unfold to starboard: the terraced vineyards above Riva Trigoso, the pale scar of a landslide no one had bothered to repair, a train threading the tunnel that cut the headland above Moneglia. The sea was the colour it goes in the Ligure in autumn, a green-grey that was not beautiful but was very specifically itself.
Monteriggi came into view after forty minutes. The village sat in a fold of the cliff, perhaps sixty houses, the colour of terracotta and bone, with the small mole of a fishing harbour and a single church tower and — further out, at the end of a low spur that ran a few hundred metres into the sea — the lighthouse.
Smaller than she had expected. Or rather, exactly the size the photograph had promised, but the photograph had flattered the scale of the spur, and now that she saw the thing in the water, exposed and plain, she understood that the keeper had lived, for sixty years, on what was more or less a stone fingernail sticking out of the coast.
The ferry put her off at the mole with three other people: a woman with a Milanese haircut and two bags of