The most dramatic building in Portovenere stands at the very tip of the promontory, perched on a black rock above the sea. San Pietro is a small Gothic church with a facade of alternating black and white marble stripes — a distinctly Genoese touch, repeated in the great cathedral at home. Built in 1198 on the foundations of a 6th-century chapel, which itself stood on the site of a Roman temple to Venus Erycina, it faces the open Ligurian Sea on one side and the Gulf of La Spezia on the other.
The interior is austere and bare, with a single nave and a few worn frescoes. What draws people is the setting: the terrace beside the church offers one of the finest views on this stretch of coast, with Palmaria island directly in front and the peaks of the Cinque Terre headlands receding northward into the haze. Come in the late afternoon, when the light turns the striped marble gold.
story: "San Pietro was built in 1198 by the Genoese on the foundations of a much older chapel dedicated to a 6th-century saint. Before that, the Romans had a temple to Venus here — and some historians believe the village's name, Porto Venere, is a corruption of Portus Veneris, the Harbour of Venus."