The shadow cast by the mountain that loomed behind our bay began to fall on the other end of the beach. Gradually it crept toward our end. As it inexorably moved toward us, it cleared a path as surely as if it had been some deadly poison gas. Where the shadow fell the beach emptied. Mothers stood up and shook out the sand from crumpled damp towels, children took one last swim as fathers implored them to get out of the water and go to the beach cabins to shower off and dress. With a rhythmic “clack,” “clack,” the Banini began to slowly make his way up the beach folding deck chairs, closing umbrellas, and emptying the ashtrays, which stood on metal spike legs, into a garbage can he carried with him.

“We’ve got about ten more minutes of sun,” said Dad. “Last chance for a swim.”

“Why don’t you come in with us, Dad?” we shouted.

“Not today, maybe tomorrow,” he replied.

Mom added her stock reproof to my father’s athletic indolence, “It’s a real shame that your father won’t go in anymore! He was always such a fine swimmer.”

“Oh, come on, Dad!” we’d say.

“The water’s too wet! It gets wetter each year.” Then Dad would laugh, but we had heard this joke so many times that all we did was roll our eyes.

“All you do is work on vacations,” said Janet.

“I have a lot of reading material to catch up on, Janet . . . anyway I enjoy reading,” Dad answered.

“Who would want to sit on a beach all day reading the Presbyterian Perspective and never go swimming?” asked Rachael.

At this point Mom would intervene lest we go too far and put Dad in a bad mood.

“That’s enough, dear, you mustn’t talk to your father like that. Look the sun is almost gone, if you want a swim you better do it now.”

Why exactly we needed to avoid swimming in the shade, after the sun had sunk behind the olive-clad hills, I never knew. But at the time I took it for granted that this was just one more unarguable truth.

After dinner that night we went for a walk, rather, the walk since it was always to the same destination: Portofino.

To walk to Portofino, you left the pensione, walked down the main road for about five hundred yards, a perilous journey in which you were all but hurled into the sea by every passing bus or car on this narrow coast-hugging ribbon of asphalt, to a small set of stairs cut into the rock face from which the path between Paraggi and Portofino is carved.

Climbing up these steps you came to the actual path, the kind of luxurious, tiled, beautiful footpath that only Italians bother to make but then forget to maintain. A path hung with every good-smelling green-bursting thing. Gardenia bushes among them.