I revisited the genteel Adriatic coast after 55 years – and was still never far from a tw-t on a moped

Italy’s western coast was a place of pizza, gelato and near anarchy. More than five decades later, I now see it in a new light

Nobody now recalls what led us to the Adriatic coast in the summer of 1969. Three families from Ealing with eight small children, crammed into a mysteriously sourced pair of mid-rise seafront apartments, at a resort otherwise exclusively populated by Italians.
The likeliest go-between: a jolly, corkscrew-haired enigma remembered only as Julius, who in common with a narrow majority of our party was of Polish heritage, but who absolutely was not from Ealing. Julius rocked up in a Renault with Swiss number plates and his daughter Julia, swelling our numbers to 16. One afternoon Julius got blown out to sea on his lilo, which burst on some distant rocks. Shortly afterwards they drove away and I never saw them again.
Viewed from the current age of smartphones and budget air travel, the logistics alone beggar belief. With flying not on the table, my elder siblings and I slid about untethered in the back of my father’s company Rover right through France and over the Alps. On an Italian motorway contraflow we were pulled over for an illegal overtake, by carabinieri with guns in their holsters. Aged five and new to the world of armed officialdom, I became tearfully convinced this was the end.
The other families, with even younger children, endured an outbound railway odyssey whose excitements remain vivid: our lifelong friends the Hellmans, canvassed for recollections, speak of sweat-slick toddlers sliding off lofty couchette bunks in the torrid, rattly dead of night, and describe the sardined final leg from Milan as ‘a garlic hell’. Somehow, far-flung and incommunicado, all of us congregated on schedule at Porto San Giorgio, in the middle of Italy’s right-hand coast. The whole venture seems little more than a leap of faith.
Whatever obscure siren call drew us here, it immediately fell silent. In the 55 years that I must accept have since elapsed, none of us has ever been back. Yet my pre-departure trawl of our memories, sadly diminished as it is with every family now a parent down, revealed a legacy dense with vivid snapshots and Proustian-grade sensory origin tales. We might have forgotten why we were there, but everyone remembers things we saw, things we ate, drank, smelled and overheard.
As my train from Ancona Airport – air-conditioned, half empty and semi-fragrant – opens its doors at a hot little platform, I’m already back in the moment, abruptly recalling a pee-stinking passageway under this track that my father squeezed our Rover through, so low on headroom he had to get out, climb up and push down the roof-mounted radio aerial.
European seaside resorts have changed beyond recognition in the last half-century. Most of them, at least. Walking along the promenade, I perform double takes of varying intensity by the dodgems at a pocket fairground, and a pair of 1960s apartment blocks with fuzzily familiar dusty-glass entrance lobbies.
None of the other buildings along the lungomare look any newer, and most are considerably older: Porto San Giorgio’s seafront is becomingly clustered with gorgeous, pastel-stucco Victorian holiday villas, all murals and loggias and balustraded terraces.
Such architectural majesty inevitably failed to lodge itself in our young minds. We only had eyes for those geometric ranks of loungers and parasols, still present and correct in their colour-coded private-beach liveries, marching across the sand to the gently lapping Adriatic. Fifty-five Augusts back, a vivacious cast of thousands massed here from dawn to dusk. Nearing sunset in early June 2024, a silent scatter of pram-pushing couples and dapper, nut-brown pensioners amble down planked walkways towards the sea, past beach volleyball courts and trim little changing huts. Italians still take their holidays in a stubbornly rigid window, which at this stage of summer is only inching open.
I’m booked into the solitary seafront hotel, four floors of balcony-fronted pink masonry. A little plaque by reception notes that the Hotel Rosa Meublé opened in July 1956 and is still run by the same family. My second-floor room is a terrazzo-floored period piece graced with three ashtrays, a complimentary pair of enormous binoculars and a varnished captain’s wheel on the wall. I access the balcony after a battle with its hefty, ratchet-strap shutter – another redolent encounter – and take in the scene. Without the binoculars, which no man of my age can be seen wielding near a public beach.
The lungomare I remember from 1969 was a reckless pandemonium, dense with jockeying, horn-happy Fiats. Three-year-old Adam, youngest of the Tarnowski clan, was knocked over one afternoon, pulled miraculously uninjured from under a chrome bumper. Now I look down at a placid, palm-lined one-way street with a big blue bike lane up the side and a 30km/h speed limit.
Cyclists, of all ages, comfortably outnumber the pootling motorists. Everyone on the pavement is slim and tanned, and generally holding hands or jogging. The vibe mixes communal joie de vivre, which feels very Italian, with slow-paced, healthful, quiet prosperity, which doesn’t. It’s almost a relief when a hefty old dear on a mobility scooter speeds by with a fag in her lips. As it is when I lean out, look right and spot a queue snaking out from the nearest gelateria.
At five, your holiday hierarchy of needs is short and very sweet. I’d had ice creams on beaches before, but PSG, as we came to abbreviate it in our emailed retrospections, presented a mind-blowing, intergalactic upgrade on insipid lollies sucked down to the stick behind a Norfolk windbreak.
We were all inducted into the kaleidoscopic world of thick, rich gelato down on those sunny sands, a memory that, in my brother’s case, comes topped with whipped cream and a debut game of table football (we brought a portable set home in the boot of the Rover, and as a result there is at least one bar sport in which I can participate without instant humiliation).
Pizza was another first, then unknown in Britain outside pockets of Soho. The beckoning aroma of singed dough and bubbling mozzarella featured prominently in that exotic PSG miasma. ‘Proper coffee, strong tobacco and pizza,’ is the nostril cocktail that still connects Nick, the younger Hellman, to his four-year-old self when he’s on any Italian beach. My own passion, born on this promenade, would swell into full-blown addiction 43 years later as I retraced all 1,965 miles of the 1914 Giro d’Italia on a 1914 bicycle: when you need to ingest serious carbohydrates and your bone-shaken fingers can’t manage cutlery, pizza is king.
I ate two a day, every day. Except for the day I ate three.
To assess the contemporary PSG stone-baked scene I head out to the seafront, where the passeggiata – the convivial native ritual that fills Italy’s evening streets with promenading friends and families – is underway, threading through the oleanders and palm trees in slightly muted pre-season form. Looking down at the full-blown August throng from our apartment balcony, my sister was captivated: this wasn’t how Ealing rolled. My nose directs me to the first beachside pizza bar, where I enjoy the moon-dappled sea view rather more than a workmanlike capricciosa. ‘You want menu of paper?’ asks the young waitress, seeing me struggle with the QR-code wine list. In 1969, nobody would have spoken a word of English here. My father, who spent his early teenage years in postwar Rome while my grandfather was this newspaper’s Italy correspondent, did all the talking.
Back in my room, the night delivers snippets of déjà vu and its sensory companions. Those laser rays of streetlight coming in through little holes in the shutters, the ominous reedy drone of a mosquito on patrol, hot feet meeting sandy cold tiles en route to the loo. Kate, Nick’s big sister, remembers the adults repairing to the balcony for a smoke after we were put to bed; more than once, we apparently crept from our dormitory and drained all the half-empty wine glasses they’d left on the dining table. Perhaps this explains why little Adam spent the small hours crawling around biting us.
The other infamous after-hours episode stars my mother, bursting into the kids’ room to wake us all up and explain the facts of life in urgent detail. My sister, then seven, remembers this with great clarity, but it evidently made no impression on me whatsoever. Five years later, I sat through the relevant biology class with my jaw on the desk.
After a typically abysmal Italian hotel breakfast of plastic-pouched jam brioches, orange squash and deafening telly, I hit the sand. Or at least poke it with a toe. Despite the best efforts of 1969 PSG, it’s been many decades since the prospect of spending more than 20 minutes in a regimented beach environment held any appeal for me, and I have successfully avoided doing so since my own children put their buckets and spades away.
The fact that I forgot to pack any swimming trunks or appropriate footwear for this trip tells its own tale. Fully clothed down to my desert boots, I install myself under a rush-roofed beach-bar parasol and consume a succession of macchiatos as the loungers around are sparingly graced with towels and tanned flesh. Before long I’m wishing I’d never seen the pallid, pervy Dirk Bogarde pegging out in his suit on a lido deckchair at the end of Death in Venice.
Happy families come and go, generating a low-key chorus of giggles and natters. Wiry grandfathers trot gamely down to the distant water for a splash with their young charges.
A small group of local boys play an accomplished and only lightly exuberant round of keepy-uppy. I order a chocolate and vanilla gelato which the sun works on a lot faster than I can, making a terrible two-tone mess that by stages despoils my face, fist and forearm.
Surveying my gracious and pristine beach-mates, and that backdrop of stately old villas, I understand that Porto San Giorgio is, and always has been, a genteel and restrained summer resort. No amusement arcades or beach-crap emporia, no raucous boozing, not even a speck of litter.
OK, this is Italy, so you’re never far from ghastly blaring Europop or some twat on a de-restricted moped. But back in 1969, this serenity was briefly fractured by a wild, pasty-faced force from afar.
‘The Italian families all sat sedately under their umbrellas while our kids ran amok,’ remembers Louis, the father Hellman. It’s clear that the natives, Catholic and conventional, were appalled by late-1960s, London-pattern boho parenting. Their biddable, orderly offspring didn’t nick their wine or bite people, or sit wide-eyed in the dark learning the mechanics of sexual congress. Nick and I both vividly recall ‘the day of big waves’, being tossed helplessly around in the washing-machine surf, years before either of us could swim and without a parent in sight.
The greatest beach-based excitement was the daily fly-by treasure drop, wherein a light aircraft trailing a banner promoting Galbani cheese roared over the sand at terrifyingly low altitude, dispensing a payload of tiny parachutes. Each bore a plastic capsule containing coupons that could be redeemed for Galbani-branded beach inflatables. The no-holds-barred juvenile frenzy that this irresponsible ritual unleashed was universal, but Team Ealing – uncompromising and unsupervised – always wanted it more. For years after, our seaside outings came sponsored by Galbani.
In 1969, Italy’s spectrum of unacceptable conduct was broad indeed, and we explored most of it. Nuns with vast sail-like wimples seemed to patrol the beach, tutting theatrically in our direction. ‘I was the only man in Italy with Jesus-style long hair and beard,’ Louis recalls, a look that in our fuzzy beach photos comes accessorised with round blue Lennon specs and tiny white shorts. ‘It freaked out the nuns.’ One afternoon my sister buried her swimming costume on the beach in some obscure act of rebellion. Nobody could find it, so for the rest of the day she had to make do with the top half of Kate’s two-piece outfit. Peak nun-rage was recorded.
To cut my parents some slack, they weren’t beach people any more than I am now. My father was a superlative sand craftsman, fashioning 1950s-style racing cars that we all sat in and spent hours pretending to race, and my mother always brought fun, silliness and glamour. But straight-up beach holidays just weren’t their thing, and we never went on one again.
 It’s no surprise that my father cracked halfway through the PSG fortnight, and drove right across Italy to Rome for a nostalgic day trip, taking Louis, me and my brother. The children left behind were furiously resentful. Thinking about it, this was almost certainly why my sister buried her bikini. To add insult to distant injury, my sole memory of that entire trip was a slot-car race track we had a go on somewhere en route.
In three wonderfully aimless days I see much more of Porto San Giorgio than I did in those two long-ago weeks. There’s a compact old town with laundry strung between lofty ochre townhouses, a Venetian fortress atop a scorching hill, a villa built for Napoleon’s wastrel brother. In a scrappy little park I come across a Fascist-era memorial, all geometric marble and lightning bolts, commemorating the 110 local seamen lost in a dreadful storm.
I enjoy hugely superior pizzas in PSG’s balmy back streets, having belatedly remembered that beach restaurants are invariably rubbish. I hone a fascination with the Hotel Rosa Meublé’s inaugural guest list, displayed in a case by the lift and replete with birth dates, nationalities and occupations, wondering what drew an 83-year-old architect here in July 1956, not to mention those teenage French sisters.
But mainly I battle with the poignant elasticities of time. When so little around me has changed, when the joins between then and now are so blurred, how can I possibly be so very much older than five? How can my mother, and Kate and Nick’s, and Adam’s father, carefree 30-somethings crackling with fun and mischief, no longer be with us? Try as I might, I cannot process the history. In 1969, only 20 years had elapsed since my father was in Rome as a 14-year-old, learning to drive the US Army jeep that was his family’s runabout. Now here he was, driving home from Italy beside his beautiful wife in a shiny new executive express, with a V8 up front and three kids in the back.
The train back to Ancona takes me up the coast, trundling through a procession of seaside towns. None seem quite as appealing as Porto San Giorgio, but every person I see is visibly having a good time: sipping coffees, waving at acquaintances, prone on beach towels with books over their faces.
In 1969 I had a lifetime of holidays ahead of me, and that fortnight set the template. The beach was just the backdrop; it was all about the mood, the general air of gregarious, lightly hedonistic sensual contentment, the warm night breeze, the nosefuls of blossom and grilled calamari. The top-drawer bare necessities of life, in the company of people who know how to appreciate them, and aren’t nuns.

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