Our mad craving for the sea: a day in Voltri

When you decide to escape from the big city for a day at the sea, you would like to have a teleporter and land on the beach at the speed of thought. For anyone setting off from Milan and its surroundings, the fastest way to achieve this is to go to Voltri. Gallery after gallery you arrive directly in the district lying furthest west in Genoa, once inhabited by the Ligurian tribe of the Veituri, from which the place name derives. Voltri, which gave birth to figures such as Goffredo Mameli and the seventeenth-century painter Orazio De Ferrari, became a city by Royal Decree in 1903 and has been part of Genoa since 1926. It took about an hour and a half by car to find ourselves strolling on the seafront, watching how snow-white gulls and majestic cormorants guard the rocks, waiting for the tastiest fish.

Voltri's promenade is very panoramic: in fine weather your gaze can range along the coast as far as Capo Noli and beyond, making you perceive with the naked eye the fact that Voltri lies at the northernmost point of the Western Mediterranean. After a turn on the seafront, we head for the historic centre, where we visit the Church of Saints Nicolò and Erasmo, built in the 17th century on the site of a thirteenth-century oratory. The warm colours of its bell tower, in harmony with the typically Ligurian houses around it, are very similar to those of the bell tower of the nearby Church of Sant'Ambrogio. That there was a chapel in the area is a documented fact from as far back as the 4th century. The church was then rebuilt and enlarged several times, as a commemorative fresco of 1266 also records.

Strolling in the alleys of the ancient village, we discover the splendid Villa Brignole Sale Duchessa di Galliera. Its park, extending over a full thirty-two hectares, is a wonderful green oasis that attracts numerous visitors throughout the year. Besides the beautiful plants of the garden, the main attraction of the park are the fallow deer: around their enclosure it is always easy to spot groups of curious children. In the vicinity we visit the Convent of San Francesco, now disused, and the Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Grazie, also dedicated to San Nicolò, on top of the hill, probably built in 343. Moving westwards, we reach Borgo Cerusa, the area of the ancient western gate of the town, today surmounted by the oldest coat of arms of the city, and we visit the Church of Santa Limbania, dating from the thirteenth century and seat of the Confraternity of the Turchini.

A few steps from here there are still several paper mills, an industry that flourished in Voltri since the Middle Ages. They say that at one time the Queen of England signed all her official documents on the excellent paper produced at Voltri. To crown this fine day with the pleasures of good food, we cannot resist the call of the sign of the Ristorante La Voglia Matta, situated a stone's throw from the Church of Santa Limbania, on Via Cerusa. We settle into the room whose sunny colours in full Ligurian style cheer us up, as do the artistic photos of fish and the other modern works of art on the walls. Chatting with the young owners, the chef Davide and Katia who welcomes us in the dining room, we discover that this is the restaurant situated furthest north in the Western Mediterranean. "We opened four years ago.

Where the restaurant is today, in those days there was one of the oldest bakeries of Voltri," they tell us. Besides the exquisite dishes on the menu, there are several set menus that can satisfy every palate, among them the surprise tasting menu, the children's menu, and the "Maximum expression of poor fish" menu. "We want to enhance poor fish, exquisite, fresh, never farmed and little known," Davide explains to us. We begin, precisely, with tasty filo pastries of poor fish with jade, with Taggiasca olive chips. We also taste a mixed starter "Crudo d'autore", with about fifteen little tasters, as well as the pure local catch with pistachio and mortadella foam and the traditional seafood cappon magro.

We follow these rich starters with the exquisite vermicelli with cuttlefish ink and little needle squid, baby spinach and lemons, the tortello filled with pesto, trap-caught prawns and Ligurian cagliata, and the gnocchetti with white fish and crunchy raw ham, dried in the oven. In choosing the main courses we divide between the excellent palamita cooked and raw with a vegetable amatriciana, the nasellotto in a crust of Taggiasca olives on steamed purée dressed Mediterranean-style, and the lampuga cooked like porchetta. We wash these delights down with Ligurian wines, but also French and German ones, and we end the dinner with some tasty little sins of gluttony: the white almond dessert, a soft lemon cake, the millefeuille with zabaglione and the Sacher in a glass.

After this wonderful dinner we are even happier about the fact that for us Voltri is the easiest point of Liguria to reach: we are certain to return soon, with our usual mad craving! Francesca Bertha FOR INFORMATION: Ristorante La Voglia Matta Via Cerusa, 63-65-67-69R Genova Voltri (GE) Tel.: 010/6101889