IN OUR EVENING RAMBLES ABOUT PORTOFINO I would sooner or later wash up on the doorstep of my friend Gino. He would be in his “summer studio” in the evening. A vine-covered courtyard up some steps carved from the living rock behind a restaurant. Beyond the door at the stairhead lay a dim open space, which Gino shared with the restaurant, a storage area for their kegs of draft beer, vast wicker-clad bottles of table wine, crates of lettuce, spinach, and stacks of empty Coca-Cola bottles. Gino would sit on an empty keg and paint by the light of a row of dim decorative light bulbs that were hung from the trelliswork above. There, squinting through a constant curl of acrid cigarette smoke (he consumed some forty filterless French Gitane cigarettes per day), Gino would paint. He never permitted anyone to watch him work but a few select friends, of whom I was one, as was the old man who waited at the bus stop to carry luggage for guests going to the Hotel Nazionale or the Splendido. The old man sat in a drunken stupor in an old deck chair, the arms stained dark with his years of inert reclining, while I squatted on the floor or perched on a spinach box and watched Gino smoke, drink, and paint a little in between drags on his cigarette and sips from his glass. Gino imbibed his whiskey from a heavy chipped water glass, all opaque with unwashed age. We sat in silence broken only by the sounds of the milling crowd in the square below.

Gino would become a little bleary after drinking half a bottle of his Johnny Walker Red Label, but at the same time he became even more polite in a slow motion sort of way. Finally he would laboriously clean his brushes, then rise unsteadily to his sandaled feet. Taking the work in progress from his easel, he replaced it with a blank white canvas. Then, returning from a small cupboard he kept there for storing his art material, he would carry a tiny eight-millimeter film projector and a case or two of film back to where we waited.

Setting his keg next to the projector he would thread the film through the gate, loop the leader onto the take-up reel, then flip the motor and light switches.

The movies we watched had all been shot by Gino. “Mia ‘obby,” as he explained before each screening. “I takea them ‘uste for mia!” Gino struck his breast to indicate how close this hobby of amateur filmmaking was to his heart, then sat down to watch his cinematic excursion.