BY: ALYSSA SCHWARTZ

I suppose that if some people plan international trips around things like gardening festivals or marathons, that booking a flight to Italy just to see a four-metre-wide frying pan in action is not an entirely unreasonable thing to do.

Of course, there are lots of reasons to visit Liguria, Italy’s northern coastal region. But when I stopped in for the day on a cruise last October – a tease, considering that I only got to see a speck of the more than 300 kilometres of coastline with its hundreds of impossibly photogenic towns and villages – it was the pan, hanging on a wall in a tiny fishing village called Camogli, that got me.

The locals like to say the pan, huge and rusty with a faded fish painted on it, is the largest in the world. While I can neither confirm nor deny this, it is big, and on the second Sunday of May each year, it comes down off the wall for Sagra del Pesce (that’s right, festival of the fish). And as we walked through town that day last fall and I lamented not having enough room in my stomach to get my fill of focaccia and pesto – both Ligurian inventions – I remembered my parents telling me about stuffing themselves silly at some crazy fish fry festival they happened upon along the Italian coast years ago. This was obviously it, and clearly I had no choice but to come back (that my travel buddy was conveniently going to be about an hour away in Nice the same week also helped to overcome my usual planning inertia).

And so we arrived in Genoa, the capital city of Liguria and Italy’s busiest port, on a warm Saturday afternoon – T-24 hours from the famous fish festival – and dropped our bags at the hotel to wander the narrow, maze-like alleys of the walled old city. While Genoa has its fair share of Christopher Columbus-related (it was the seafaring explorer’s birthplace) and other attractions, it’s also the perfect place to wander and then get lost, stopping for a beer or gelato or in one of the many, cheap focaccerias for sustenance. Here’s where you’ll want to start your tastes of Liguria tour. Dinner at Sa Pesta, a hole in the wall within the old city walls that eschews décor, good lighting or ambience, plays out like a Ligurian greatest hits LP – greaseless fritto misto, crisp ferinata, a thick, savoury chickpea crepe topped with salty stracchino cheese, and of course, heaping bowls of pasta topped with pesto.

You may think you know from pesto, but the sauce in Liguria is sweeter than its counterparts. It’s a lighter, more lively shade of green and relies less on garlic than the versions that have made their way over the Atlantic. One taste and the trip adopts a new mission – consume as much pesto as possible. This is how we found ourselves at a table inside Eataly – the Italian predecessor to the landmark New York grocery store-cum-restaurant – the next morning, dragging chunks of focaccia through a massive jar of pesto, a little burrata on the side for protein. If the locals found us strange, we were too absorbed by our unorthodox breakfast of champions to notice.

From there it’s on to Nervi, where we sniffed roses bigger than our heads and then stared blissfully out at sea while spooning soft lemon granita. There’s a lot of staring out at the sea that happens during this trip. From our balcony overlooking Santa Margherita Ligure the next day, as we sip horrifically overpriced limoncello at a café in the port in Portofino (our waiter told us not to order it because of the mark-up, but some places are worth the premium). Because that’s the other thing about Liguria. Its patron saint may be St. George, a warrior, but they may as well have the patron saint of doing dick-all looking out for them – there’s precious little you’ll feel compelled to do other than eat and enjoy the view. You could hike (and in winter, Liguria’s interior mountains offer skiing), though the six kilometre stroll from Santa Margherita Ligure to Portofino – over blue-green waters and the roofs of palatial cliffside villas – is as ambitious as we get. The walk is the only way to work up sufficient appetite for dinner at the legendary Hotel Splendido, where we sip what we’re told are the first bellinis of the season (I bet they say that to all the girls) and spend more time staring out at that sea, spying out of the corner of our eyes Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten herself, doing exactly what we’re doing – is there any better sign that you’re in the place that defines the good life?

Nope. If you’re going to set goals here, make sure they’re no more lofty than trying to set a new record for the most pesto meals in one day, or catching a fish fry.

Which brings me back to Sagra del Pesce and that pan. When we make it to Camogli, after a day of much meandering, we park the car on the outskirts of town and see hordes – literally hordes – of people walking out of the port. That’s right: after so much doing nothing, we managed to slack our way right out of accomplishing the main goal of the trip. The festival was finito. Down in the port, there’s still smoke coming off the pan (sadly, it’s not even the pan I saw hanging on the wall all those months back – like so many great things in life, the event has recently been co-opted and branded, in this case, by an Italian cooking oil) and a heavy fried smell in the air, much like the CNE.

There’s a podium that’s been erected, right on the water, to house the massive pan, and at its base is a crowd of disbelieving revellers, their arms thrown in the air, begging for more fish. Among them is an elderly woman, moving her lips wordlessly. She looks devastated. Hilariously, the pan attendants hand her some leftover lemons, still attached to a leafy tree branch. Perhaps she’s reminded of the old cliché, but this seems to appease her. For us glasses of chilled white wine at a table beside the water seem the better way to nurse the disappointment. If this is failure, I suppose I can live with it.

IF YOU GO...

Getting there: Genoa is an hour from Rome by plane, with multiple direct flights daily, or four hours by train. There are trains that run the length of the Ligurian coast, but you’ll want a car to meander as you please.

Stay: In Genoa we stayed at the Best Western City Hotel, which offers sleek, compact, clean rooms a short walk to the old port and walled city. Santa Margherita Ligure, a picturesque port about an hour from Genoa, makes an excellent base for exploring Liguria’s easterly villages. We stayed at the Hotel Metropole, perched just above the town centre and overlooking the sea.

Eat: Sa Pesta for classic Ligurian dishes in a setting that probably hasn’t changed since Nonna was born; Genoa’s Eataly places more emphasis on the grocery side of the equation than its New York counterpart, but whether you dine at one of their food stations or pull together an impromptu picnic as we did, tasty local options abound. While the food at Hotel Splendido is excellent, dining here is about so much more than the meal. From the portrait gallery in the lounge depicting decades of old Hollywood glamour to stunning views of the Portofino harbour, you’ll wish you’d splurged on a room.  

Alyssa Schwartz is a Toronto-based travel and lifestyle writer. Find her on Twitter @alyssaschwartz