On sunny days in Saint-Paul de Vence, you can’t tell the sea from the sky. Water and air coalesce into a curtain of deep blue. It’s a hue echoed in the work of artist Marc Chagall, who made a home in this medieval village in the hills high above Nice. “This beautiful blue is called azure,” says my guide, a local woman. “That is why this coast is named ‘the Côte d’Azur’.”
I can only imagine the seamless effect she describes, for on the day I visit a frill of cloud is obscuring the illusion. It mimics the snowcaps I can see on the alps to the north. Thawed by the approaching spring, they slide like soft-serve down the sides of an inverted ice-cream cone. “In April we can go skiing in the morning, and swimming at the beach in the afternoon,” the guide says.
Those beaches had languished out of sight as the tour bus climbed into the hinterland behind the port of Monte Carlo in the nearby principality of Monaco, where the Regent Seven Seas Splendor is preparing for a 10-day cruise to Athens.
But the coastline opens wide below the Point de Vue lookout. How would Chagall render today’s vista, I wonder – in oil, stained glass, mosaics? Alas, the Belarusian-born master lies entombed below me in the Cimetière de Saint-Paul de Vence, which overlooks the Malvan Valley and a wisp of Mediterranean coastline. Along with Matisse and Miró, Chagall left his colourful mark on the walls of La Colombe d’Or restaurant, where Yves Montand and Simone Signoret were married. These literati were among a litany of writers, film stars and artists lured here by moody light and rarefied scenery.
Join the block party
The blue curtain has fallen again when we set sail from Monte Carlo. The skyline dissolves in a blaze of spangled glass, and the Ligurian Sea yawns fathomless before us. It will take a day and two nights to reach Salerno. But so deluxe is the Splendor, most guests would be willing to spend weeks afloat while indulging in haute cuisine and designer cocktails at the ship’s eight restaurants and six bars, wallowing in the outdoor pool, testing their karaoke and mahjong skills in the lounges, and getting to know fellow travellers who’ve gathered here from around the world. Such ice-breaking is hastened at the shipwide ‘block party’, when we’re instructed to “take a glass from our suites” and we step into the corridor to meet our neighbours. “My name’s John,” says an Australian. “Unless you find me misbehaving, in which case you can call me Mike.” The block party is rambunctious, but John doesn’t metamorphose into Mike; reputations remain intact. Captain Ubaldo Armellino and his staff zigzag athletically from the Regent Suite all the way down to my Penthouse Suite on the 6th, clinking their (alcohol-free) glasses along the way with guests’ bottomless champagne flutes, placed in our suites earlier by personal butlers. Later, I sink into a dreamy sleep buoyed by an ocean purling beneath me like a gargantuan waterbed.
Captain Armellino could probably sail to Salerno in his sleep. The city lies close to Sorrento, where he was born into a family of seafarers; it’s under an hour’s drive south-east of Naples. We’ll spend three nights in this comparatively under-visited spot, enjoying an “immersive overnights” program that extends time in each port of call and encourages guests to strike off in every direction.
Opening my curtains early on the third day, I find the ship docked beside Salerno’s futuristic cruise terminal. Behind it, the timeworn city encircling the Duomo di Salerno is waking to a tarnished sky and ice-blue Tyrrhenian Sea – subdued echoes of my suite’s clotted-cream-and-cobalt furnishings. But the palette is about to turn yellow as our bus weaves north-west through the hills towards the Sorrentine Peninsula.
“If you turn your head around you’re going to see two things,” says guide Paolo Acanfora. “Hotels and lemon trees.” The hotels are like Golden Age movie sets; the trees are droopy with the region’s signature fruit. But the views beyond distract me. “We’re going to drive into Sorrento on the Mamma Mia road,” Acanfora says. “You know why ‘Mamma Mia’? Because – oh my God, it’s so beautiful, we say, ‘Mamma Mia!’”
I say nothing, for I’m rendered speechless by the sweep of cliffs and Mount Vesuvius sprawled beyond the Gulf of Naples, its crown of cloud recalling that famous eruption. Arriving in Sorrento, Acanfora momentarily forgets lemons as he leads us into a shop where Libby Gorga is demonstrating the city’s age-old craft of inlaying wood. “This old lady is from Brooklyn, but she’s been here forever,” he says. “She met a Casanova and now she can’t leave.” Gorga shoots back: “I raised this guy,” she says, her New York accent undiminished. “I knew his father. He always wore a nice suit with a handkerchief in his pocket.”
The ‘old lady’s’ 53-year Italian sojourn puts my fleeting visit to shame. Andrea Bocelli’s Time to Say Goodbye serenades us from the cruise terminal as we cast off for the Ionian Sea. I’m consoled by bruschetta and osso buco and limoncello at Sette Mari at La Veranda, the ship’s Italian restaurant. Later that night, we pass soundlessly between the tip of Italy’s boot and Sicily.
Turkish delight
If Sorrento is yellow and Saint-Paul de Vence blue, the Turkish port of Kuşadasi is a glorious splash of red. I see it in the silk carpets hanging outside shopfronts as they’ve done since Ottoman times; in the wine and gelato made from mulberries in the village of Şirince; in the cherry, fig and pomegranate trees studding the hillsides. By contrast, the ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus are smothered in antiquity’s patina. In its hilly southern fringes sits the stone house where the Virgin Mary is said to have lived in old age. Known colloquially as Meryemana Evi, it was rebuilt most recently in 1951 and is now a Catholic shrine. “They built directly over the original foundations, in that same architectural style,” says guide Ayşegül Çakir.
Pilgrims file solemnly across foundations lustrous with centuries of footfall; they light butter-yellow candles in an alcove outside, pin notes of prayer to a stone wall, and sip ‘holy’ water from taps connected to an ancient cistern. “Muslims visit, too, because they respect her a lot,” says Çakir. “Mereyem is a common name among Turkish women.”
As though in foretelling the end of the journey, the preceding days’ colour seems to drain away as Athens materialises, a monochrome citadel bulwarking the hillsides. From the Acropolis I will see the birthplace of democracy sprawling like a faded daguerreotype. On the way there we pass Marina Zeas, named for Zeus.
“Zeus was the most important of the ancient gods,” says guide Lucy Balafa, “father of mortals and father of Athena, the beautiful blue-eyed goddess and patroness of Athens. Nowadays, the marina is the place where people take their sailing boats and go for cruises around the Mediterranean Sea.”
Blue is slowly seeping back into the colour spectrum: Athena’s eyes, the sea, the striped Greek flag flapping atop the Hellenic Parliament on Syntagma Square. I think back to those mythical curtains of blue in Saint-Paul de Vence, and realise I’ve come full circle.
