We woke to a pretty typical day for the region at this time of year with a nice, warm temperature and a fair bit of humidity evident in the form of a low, light blanket of cloud. You can sometimes get too used to nothing but sunshine on a Mediterranean cruise so it can be nice to change it up now and then but the lack of brightness did have an impact on the appearance of the buildings surrounding the port area which looked as though they might really explode with colour if the sun had been out. Their colours were also very typical for buildings in Italy with pinks, oranges, yellows, and pale greens dominating.

The excursion we’d be taking for this day docked at Genoa would be a boat trip which, if you’ve read previous cruise travelogues or if you’ve just clicked that linked text back there, you’ll know we do a lot. Yes, even when we’re off on a cruise we often look out for trips we can do that then also involve boats. What can I say? We live in an island city in an island country. We like the water.

After a sensible breakfast – something not too filling because you never know quite what a boat trip will be like especially when it’s one, like this, that will be at sea rather than down a river – we disembarked to meet up with our excursion group dockside where we were given headphones in order that we would all be able to hear our guide. There was then a fairly considerable walk through the port buildings and around the rear to where our boat was waiting. The walk, in fact, was long enough that one person with walking difficulties got left behind and her son had to get off the boat to go find her which delayed our departure a little.

The boat was one of those with seating on two levels, most of it in benches on the top with some spaces below and under cover as well as exposed at the front and rear. With three tour groups taking the same boat and with ours being the last to board all of the seating on top was already nabbed by those who’d arrived first so we ended up sitting on the lower level and at the back which wouldn’t have been my first choice. As it would turn out this would be a blessing in disguise, though, as some of the boat trip was quite bumpy which would have made standing up top more difficult and I would have blocked views of the other passengers (I’m considerate like that, you know). Our location meant I was never in anyone’s way so could remain standing for the entire trip and use some of the railings around for support.

You can sometimes forget just how big your cruise ship is once you’ve been on it for a while. Comparing the size of Emerald Princess with the other vessels in Genoa’s port and with the buildings visible around from around the water level really brought it all back into perspective as we slowly left the city.

This video (temporarily removed) really shows you the size and length of the ship.

Our only prior stop in an Italian port had been three years earlier when we’d visited Naples aboard Royal Princess and we’d noticed the very distinctive artwork decorating a Moby cruise ferry nearby. We were pleased, then, to see another very prominent Looney Tunes-decorated ship of the fleet, Moby Otta. If we ever take a land-based holiday to Italy and have the time we are definitely going to have to look into booking a trip aboard one of these ferries just to see what they’re like inside. The Moby ship wasn’t alone in sporting impressive hull artwork as the port was also hosting a couple of Tirennia ships (also run by Moby) including the Batman-decorated Tirennia Nuraghes, as well as the GNV Rhapsody ferry which appeared to be running an advert for a music festival on its exterior. I’m not sure how I feel about adverts on ships but I’ve got an inkling that I don’t like them.

People who know me know that I like looking at the architecture of buildings and that my favourite style is brutalism. Before we were treated to hours of gazing across the water at very Italian-style houses and churches along the coastline, therefore, I was immensely pleased to spot a particularly nice-looking concrete beauty in the Genoan port. It was a very typical port structure, similar to ones we’d seen in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, likely built around the same time and for the same purposes, and now similarly abandoned-looking (I wonder if you can get photo tours of these places).

Harbour controls keep vessel speeds low in the port areas for obvious reasons which gave me plenty of opportunities to go snap-crazy with the camera (what a surprise) as we slowly made our way out to the open sea.

The only really interesting sight as we left Genoa was spotting a statue of the Virgin Mary with sceptre, crown, key, and baby Jesus at the port entrance. This was the first reminder that we were now most definitely in Roman Catholic territory and all the horrors of my childhood and my private education by monks (yeah, you didn’t know that about me, did you?) came flooding back. But then I remembered I was at sea on a cruising holiday and all the horrors quickly drowned and sank beneath the waves. Hooray for cruising!

The first stop on our boat trip excursion would be at the village of Camogli, a journey of around 35 minutes. Along the way we would be treated to views of the sometimes rugged Italian coastline and the many buildings erected to take advantage of the clearly fabulous views of the sea as well as some of the impressive infrastructure development in terms of scenic roads and arched bridges for road and rail traffic.

Bagni Santa Chiara is a popular location just to the east of Genoa, renowned for its sunset views and opportunities to enjoy them with cocktails and wine.

As we moved farther along the coast away from Genoa the colours of the buildings seemed to become brighter and closer in tone to those you see in all the super-saturated images begging you to visit this part of the world as if the Italian city had dulled the vibrancy of those in closer proximity; perhaps an indication of pollution from all the harbour activity, perhaps a statement about how busy life is nearer the city and how it reduces the opportunity to clean the buildings, perhaps the buildings are newer, perhaps they’ve just got better paint in the fancier spots of Liguria.

The church you can see in the first of the following pictures is the Church of Santa Maria Assunta while the impressive-looking building with the tower in the second photo is a school with scenery I’d probably find quite distracting if I were studying there. This was Porticciolo di Nervi, another one of those gorgeous little villages along Italy’s coast with undoubtedly beautiful evening views and thoroughly relaxing experiences waiting to be had when the weather’s just right.

A very short distance from that pleasant marina area was the train stop you’d want if you were visiting this area of Italy and wanted to use public transport. The church to the left is the Church of San Siro and the attractive little station with sea views is Genova Nervi.

Bagni Scogliera is a reasonably sheltered location with some picturesque rocky outcrops making for a pleasant and popular location to bathe in the Mediterranean water.

You never seem to be very far from a church in Italy and it’s quite likely that the locals use them to navigate in much the same way that we use pubs (our own buildings of religious worship).

Pieve Ligure is a municipality about 13 kilometres from Genoa, easily identifiable from sea by the huge arches carved into the rock at the base of the cliff on which it stands. A pieve is a rural church with a baptistry. This lesson from our course Things You Never Wanted To Know And Have Probably Already Forgotten was absolutely free.

The final place of note spotted on this first part of our boat trip was the municipality of Sori nestled in the valley between two hilly areas of the coast. Unlike some of the other places we’d passed, Sori was large enough to have a little bit of interesting history behind it. It’s claimed that the city was founded by Greek immigrants but the first time Sori was mentioned in writing was in the twelfth century. In 1580 Sori was affected by the plague, evidence for this coming from the number of wills that were hastily drawn up and saved at that time. Just four years later 1500 Algerian pirates in 22 galleys landed at Sori and sacked it over the course of a day, taking 134 people (mostly women, of course) as slaves. Money was collected to pay for the release of the slaves but to no avail and even pleas to Donna Zenobia del Carretto, the wife of the Admiral of the Genoese Fleet, Giovanni Andrea Doria, met with failure. The bridges you can see in the photos were built after the second world war, the originals having been naturally targeted by allied bombing raids.

In the next post of this travelogue series I’ll detail what we got up to in Camogli, the first of the three stops we would make on this excursion along Italy’s coastline by boat.

• the light was different; it was later in the day and the sun had burned off the cloud cover that had accompanied us on our trip during the morning
• no parasitical organism had invaded my brain and disabled that part of me that always takes photos even if I’ve taken them dozens of times before; I was still most definitely me

If you’ve read any of the many travelogues on this site then you already know that I take a lot of photos and I’m pretty indiscriminate when it comes to sharing them with the world. Let this moment be no different to any other one. Behold! The Italian coast!

That place over there is San Fruttuoso.

I know.

Just letting you know.

I was on this boat earlier when we passed it the first time.

Just checking that a parasitical organism hadn’t invaded your brain and stolen your memories.

You’re a kind and considerate husband.

The journey back along the coastline seemed to be taking place at a faster pace than the one that had taken us out from Genoa in the morning. I can understand that. Who amongst us hasn’t commuted to work at as slow a rate as possible to delay the inevitable drudgery then bolted for home at the end of the day?

The higher speed of the boat in the water was creating some interesting overlapping wake patterns behind us and I found myself mesmerised by the interactions between peaks and troughs and the combination of straight lines of churn overlaid with gently curving foam tracks.

Look at the patterns in the wake.

Very pretty.

They’re really interesting when you really think about it.

No! Stop it!

What!? Why?

You’re going to try to get me to do some maths or physics in my head, aren’t you? We said we weren’t going to arbitrarily calculate things on this cruise.

How can you think that!? I just thought the colours were nice.

Sure you did.

I tried not to let being accused of such a thing by my wife spoil the day and just enjoyed the view from our aft position on the boat, quietly estimating differences in distance between the curving lines of wake against best guess at speed to determine what the rate of decay of dispersal from the central position of the vessel’s length was on an imaginary set of axes in my head.

The number of buildings suddenly increased as we neared Genoa and started passing the suburbs of that city as opposed to individual towns and villages.

We’d seen a few other boats as we’d hugged the coastline during our return journey but they’d been almost universally tourist vessels or ferries of some kind. As we slowed on our approach to Genoa’s port we noticed people out for pleasure: small yachts, kayaks (if you call that pleasure), fishing boats (ditto).

The port of Genoa looked far brighter and far more attractive in the sunshine of the late afternoon although for all the cranes and other industrial sights around there appeared to be nothing that needed unloading and it all seemed quite quiet and peaceful too. Our boat’s engines had been cut to a minimum – a safety requirement of being within the port confines, undoubtedly – and this last part of our day’s boat trip excursion along the Italian coast was wonderfully peaceful.

It’s always lovely to see your cruise ship up close and from the perspective of the water line either on a tender boat or, like on this occasion, a tourist vessel, and we particularly love the Sea Witch logo on the front of Princess vessels.

That marked the end of our excursion for the day and we let the melee of people getting off the boat in order to get back on Emerald Princess to make up for missed buffets dissipate before we disembarked and headed back to our room ourselves.

A quick freshen up allowed us to formulate a plan for the evening which was to grab a quick drink or two then catch the departure from the port either from our balcony or the promenade deck ahead of dinner. That’s not much of a plan and not anything that anyone who’s read any of these cruise accounts couldn’t have guessed but it was a plan. We started with a wine each in Vines then forced ourselves up the couple of flights of stairs in the piazza to Crooners.

Our plan crumbled into dust. In Crooners we found ourselves seated next to an American couple (an older woman and her son, around our age) who’d been on the boat tour with us. We started talking about our thoughts on the cruise excursion – we all agreed that Camogli had the most appeal – and where everyone was from and what made everyone choose this cruise – they were on for three weeks, not just the one that we were – and what we were drinking – “Ooh, that looks pretty. I might try one of those!” – and whether we should have another one – “Well, we shouldn’t but we are on vacation” – and whether we should have another one – “We’ve missed the cruise away from Genoa now anyway” – and whether we should have another one – “Still plenty of time to have dinner” – and you get the picture.

We eventually tore ourselves away from our new friends and headed down one flight of stairs again to get something inside us to soak up the cocktail of cocktails. All very nice. Probably. Thoughts were muddled a smidge at this point.

At this point on any normal evening aboard a Princess Cruises ship we would hit another bar before making our way to Skywalkers but that wasn’t the case this time around. I know what you’re thinking. So, a parasitical organism had invaded their brains after all! But, no. We wanted to go and see the deck party taking place around the swimming pool. Now, admittedly, such behaviour in us is almost indistinguishable from actually having parasitical organisms in the brain under normal circumstances but there were mitigations at work here that for once didn’t (entirely) include alcohol.

Firstly, we’d attended the deck party aboard Star Princess as it departed Puerto Vallarta earlier in the year on what was going to be, for me, The Cruise Where I Took A Lot More Video Than Normal. And I did. Unfortunately, I hadn’t planned on that occasion also being The Cruise Where I Lost Almost All The Video I’d Taken and amongst the videos never to see the light of day were the ones around the evening’s Love Boat-themed entertainment. For that reason, I wanted a second bite at capturing some of the atmosphere.

The second factor in deciding to hit the pool deck party was that the Americans we’d been drinking with hadn’t attended one before but were very big Love Boat fans. We’d played up just how much effort Princess put into their themed deck parties with cameo appearances from the cast and staff and, well, we figured we almost had to turn up in case they did.

As it turned out, the son did turn up and I’m glad he did because I then used talking to him down at poolside near the staff as an excuse to get right into the action of the party as opposed to simply videoing it from afar as I had done previously. The result, I think, is much better, really captures some of the fun of the entertainment, really shows off how engaging the staff were. I hope you’ll watch the video below to see elements of the staff engaging with me and playing up for the camera, to see how good the house band Topaz were, to see the Emerald Princess’s dancers don afro wigs and expose their chests, and to see some of the Love Boat touches, especially towards the end.

The next day would be our final full day aboard the cruise ship and we’d be docking at Livorno where we had an excursion planned again. With a wine-tasting! Becalm your surprise! That will be covered in the next post in this travel diary series.