Nine rooms on a cliff above Camogli. One family, one boat, one long table.
The house is below
The House
Casa Vento is a stone house from 1911 on the cliff path east of Camogli, on the Ligurian coast. The Oliveri family has lived in it for three generations. In 2019 they stopped pretending it was just a house and put nine rooms up for guests.
There is no spa. There is no pool. There are walls a meter thick, a kitchen that runs on what the boat and the market bring in, a terrace with a long table, and a path down to the water that takes five minutes if you do not stop to look. Most people stop to look.
Marta Oliveri runs the rooms. Her brother Franco runs the boat. Their mother still argues with the olive press in Ruta about the oil.
Nine rooms. No chain. No front desk. Knock on the kitchen door.
Rooms
The house was not built for guests, so the rooms are what the house allowed. That is the point.
34 sqm · top floor east
The biggest room and the first to get light. Two windows over the water, a bed the Oliveris' grandfather made, a bathtub under the sloped roof. The sunrise will wake you around six in summer. Some people close the shutters. Fewer than you would think.
27 sqm · top floor west
Faces the evening. A small covered balcony with two chairs and room for exactly one bottle. The plaster in here is original and cracked in one corner; Marta refuses to fix it because her father drew a boat there in pencil in 1963. It is still there.
21 sqm · the old watchtower
Up its own spiral stair, a round room with windows on three sides. Smallest bathroom in the house, best view in the province. Not for anyone with heavy luggage or bad knees. People ask for it a year out.
25 sqm · garden level
Opens straight onto the olive terrace. Cool in August, private, the only room where you can walk out barefoot and pick a fig before breakfast. Sea heard, not seen.
23 sqm · first floor north
The quiet one. Faces the pines and the cliff path, not the water. Thickest walls, darkest sleep. Franco calls it the room for people who came to sleep, then gets told off for saying it in front of guests booked into the sea rooms.
22 to 26 sqm · first floor
The four wind rooms. Sea views at an angle, stone floors, showers rebuilt in 2021, and the same beds as everywhere else because Marta buys one mattress and buys it right. If the named rooms above are taken, take any of these and lose nothing that matters.
Rooms run 380 to 640 EUR a night depending on room and season, breakfast and the boat included. La Torretta is 640 flat because there is only one of it.
The Table
Dinner at Casa Vento is one long table on the terrace, 8 p.m., everyone together. There is no menu. Franco's boat comes in around eleven; whatever is in the crates is dinner. Anchovies in June. Tuna when the tuna decide. If the sea gives nothing, Signora Oliveri makes trofie with pesto she will not write down for anyone, and nobody complains.
The wine is from the Rissetto family two valleys over. They make about four thousand bottles a year and export none of them. It is a pale, sharp white that tastes like the terrace it grew on. You will not find it at home. Guests keep trying to fit bottles in their luggage anyway.
Lunch is simpler: bread, cheese, tomatoes, oil from the press in Ruta, whoever happens to be around. Breakfast runs from seven until the last person gives up on the idea of morning.
Dinner is 55 EUR, wine on the table, one seating at 8. Tell Marta by 4 if you are in.
The Cliff and Camogli
Portofino is forty minutes away and you can go if you want. Nobody here will.
Camogli is a fishing town that still fishes. The path from the house drops five minutes to a stone landing where you can swim off the rocks; the water is deep, clear, and cold enough in the morning to fix most problems. Fifteen minutes further along the cliff path is San Rocco, a church, a bakery, and a view that has stopped stronger people than you.
Walk the other way and in half an hour you are at Punta Chiappa, where Bruno has been pulling up nets since before Marta was born and will sell you anchovies straight off the boat if you ask him in the morning and do not ask him in August.
The house sits on the last private stretch of the path. Past the gate, it is pines, rock, and water. That is the whole neighborhood.
Camogli center: 20 minutes on foot down, 30 back up. Worth both directions.
A Day Here
7:00
Franco takes the boat out. The Gianna B. holds six guests. Go once. Most people go three times.
9:00
Market in Camogli. Marta shops for the kitchen; you can walk down with her and carry things, which sounds like a chore and is somehow the thing people write about afterward.
11:00
Swim off the landing. Or do not.
13:00
Lunch on the terrace, long.
16:00
Nothing. This is scheduled. The house goes quiet, the light goes gold, and the only decision left is the chair.
20:00
Dinner, one table.
Later
The terrace, the Rissetto white, and whoever is still up.
There is no activities desk. There is Franco, and Franco has opinions.
Calendar
Casa Vento is not on the booking sites. Nine rooms do not need a middleman, and the commission money is better spent on the boat. You book directly, Marta confirms personally, usually the same day, occasionally after lunch.
Open April through October. Two-night minimum. Dogs yes, small children yes, groups that book the whole house yes, and those go fast for September.
