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All places have narratives: a back catalog of plot. On the Amalfi Coast, one of the most quintessentially Italian places in Italy, there are stories of the visiting Greeks and the temples they built and filled with lithe sculptures; the Arabs and their colored tile work; the Normans, nervously building watchtowers in case the Saracens turned up; the medieval fleets of Amalfi itself, commanding the Mediterranean and sailing home with cargoes of silver and lemon-tree saplings. There is the myth of Odysseus, ghosting past the sirens, and the tales of celebrities coming south from Rome in the 1950s and 1960s: people such as Franco Zeffirelli, John Steinbeck, and Jackie Kennedy, astonished by the sheer gorgeousness of the area and how blissfully separate it was from any place or any life they knew.
A narrow, acrobatic road hugs the cliffs, disorienting people unaccustomed to driving within a couple of inches of someone else's side-view mirror. At each bend, there's another sharp intake of breath, another panoramic view, another story waiting to be told. Amalfi's renowned beauty can seem unreal: a barely credible conjunction of sea, sky, and mountains. Beneath the cliffs, the land swoons down through a tumult of rock, blossoms, pine trees, and villas to a shore indented with bays. Seen from above, the sea is always the most extraordinary blue, its surface patterned with winds and cloud shadows, the wakes of pleasure boats scrolling behind like vapor trails.
Some years ago I had lunch here with Isabella Quarantotti, the widow of the great Neapolitan playwright Eduardo de Filippo. Well into her 70s, Isabella was an intense, sprite-like figure. It was June, the sun warm, grapes budding among the leaves on trellised vines above us. On a terrace table were plates of prosciutto, burrata, and velvet-soft figs. Across the bay was Positano, named after the Greek god Poseidon, the tiled dome of its church presenting a moment of symmetry and order among the puzzle of houses tumbling down from that mad road.
Isabella, who had been coming to Positano for years, reminisced about the cobblers who sewed sandals on the beach, the fishermen unloading buckets of silvery anchovies at the dock, and the powerful matriarchy of black-clad women who, she claimed, ruled the town. In that same time, she recalled, you might have run into Maria Callas, Sophia Loren, or Rudolf Nureyev.
Gesticulating airily at the islands of Li Galli, distant silhouettes in a silver sea, Isabella talked about Nureyev and Odysseus as if they might have been neighbors. Nureyev used to own the only villa on the islands. She remembered his picnics: the cushions, the long banners of silk draped between the trees. As for Odysseus, it was from Li Galli, she said, that the sirens called to him.
“There is something pagan here,” Isabella told me. “The beauty of this place gets into your soul, and you forget everything else.”
She remembered the festivities of Ferragosto, when young shepherds came down into the town from the hillsides with their zampogne (bagpipes) and tamborelli (hand drums). Later, with the church locked and the priest abed, the villagers and visitors danced on the midnight beach to the sound of the shepherds' pipes. Isabella leaned forward, her eyes shining.
“It was like a scene on an ancient Greek vase,” she said. “Sensuous and mischievous—the musicians, the satyrs, the dancers. We were young. We all lost our heads.”
On this coast, everything is vertical; everything clings to steep slopes. People don't speak of right or left but of up and down. The spine of the peninsula is the Lattari Mountains, which cascade from peaks of well over 1,000 feet straight into the Tyrrhenian Sea, in a series of precipitous valleys. That mountain barrier gives this coast its separate identity, with the road embracing the vertical world, vaulting across dizzy chasms and spinning past old villas in terraced gardens. Wherever you find yourself—in a high vineyard, in a boutique of designer beachwear, at a roadside stall with piles of vegetables, in a bar where an absurdly handsome fellow is mixing cocktails—it always feels like being on one of the world's greatest balconies, cantilevered over that stupendous view.
There are three famous towns on this coast. Positano is the lightweight: starstruck, pretty, a snakes-and-ladders place awash with high-end shops and smart villas. Farther along is Amalfi, its Moorish whitewashed alleys dividing houses clustered in the shadow of a sprawling cathedral. High above it, up a road so narrow that two-way traffic needs to take turns, is dignified Ravello, full of aristocratic estates with elaborate gardens. Its residents and visitors have often included cultural heavyweights: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Richard Wagner, and Gore Vidal. Between these three towns is a scattering of smaller coastal villages—Praiano, Atrani, Conca dei Marini—each with their particular charm, pocket-size piazzas, ancient churches, and carefree sea air. The astute visit is in the shoulder seasons of April to June or September to October, when the swimming is still blissful but the crowds are thinner.
I thought of Isabella as I headed inland into the hills. Villages appeared in unexpected folds in the steep flanks of the valley, each marked by a church spire. The road twisted like a beanstalk as it ascended through varied landscapes. First came the lemon orchards, the fruit-like baubles on the trees. Then ancient vineyards, with plants of up to 400 years old. Then stone-walled terraces of olives. And finally, chestnut woods, their green depths dappled with sun.
From the village of Bomerano, I set off on foot along the Sentiero degli Dei, the Path of the Gods, which crosses high pastures and distant stone terraces to Nocella. It felt good to stretch my legs, to feel my blood pumping, to walk like a pilgrim through this remote world of clear air and spectacular panoramas. Far below, framed by plunging slopes, tiny boats inched across the water.
In a sloped meadow, I met the bearlike Antonio, a fourth-generation shepherd who was renovating his grandfather's 400-year-old house. Inside, prosciutto and cowbells hung from the rafters. He poured wine from one of the huge barrels along the end wall. On shelves were jugs of oil and vinegar, slabs of pecorino, a bag of nails, a small hand sickle, and a pot of honey.
We sat outside at a rough wooden table, looking down at the sea far below. Antonio brought plates of salami, tomatoes, and marinated pumpkin. “Che bella casa,” I said. Antonio leaned forward as if he had a secret. “It is not a house,” he said. “It is a library of stories.” He told me that his mother had wanted him to work in one of the hotels on the coast: a salary, a smart uniform, a career. It was already too late, he shrugged. He had caught the passion for the mountains from his father. So he came back here, to this remote house, to resurrect that life. He poured more wine. He was happy to be home where he belonged. We are close to God up here, he said, “vicino a Dio.”
Then he took down his tamborello from a hook on the wall and sang. His voice was like the wine: raw and earthy. It was a raucous song to accompany the tarantella, a traditional mesmeric dance of Southern Italy with ancient pagan roots. The hard pulse of the drum was an echo of Isabella's festive nights, and I thought of her on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea when she was young, dancing with the shepherds on the moonlit beach in Positano.
Where to stay
When it opened in spring 2022 after a four-year rebuild, Borgo Santandrea was the talk of the coast.
“I wanted people to have the experience of a glamorous villa,” says its passionate Ischia-born co-owner Salvatore Orlacchio, “but also to feel they are hosted by a family, with a warm Italian welcome.”
The hotel brings classical motifs to the clean mid-20th-century style championed by Italian architects such as Gio Ponti. The rooms, with a blue-and-white palette inspired by the sea, are huge and flooded with light. The private garden terraces have pools framed by vines. Splendid tiled floors are partly inspired by Roman geometric designs. Pathways meander through gardens of olives and bougainvillea to a pretty beach on Conca dei Marini, where a shore bar and restaurant in a renovated boathouse makes for a casual lunch spot. The moonlit terrace of the Alici restaurant, which does a heavenly lemon risotto, is the loveliest spot on this absurdly romantic coast.
In 2000, visiting American Bianca Sharma spotted this striking 17th-century Dominican monastery from a boat. On discovering it was abandoned and for sale, she embarked, against all advice, on an 11-year project to buy, renovate, and launch extraordinary hotel Monastero Santa Rosa, which manages the clever trick of feeling both grand and intimate. Though the last of the nuns left in 1912, there remains a sense of cloistered, meditative peace. Trellised gardens tumble down the terraces to a huge infinity pool. Splendid remnants of convent furniture have the sheen of three centuries of devout waxing. There is even a confessional, should visitors need to unburden their sins, plus a first-class spa and the Michelin-starred Il Refettorio restaurant.
In the summer of 1941, 18-year-old Franco Zeffirelli set out on a bicycle tour along the Amalfi Coast. “We had been transported into the Garden of Eden,” he would write in his autobiography. He became a regular visitor. In 1969, now Italy's most famous theater, opera, and film director, he bought what was then called Villa Treville. He poured his heart into its decoration with whimsical mosaics, hand-painted tiles, and a stunning collection of local ceramics. Treville Positano's guest book was a who's who of the 1960s and 1970s: Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Tennessee Williams, and Eduardo de Filippo all stayed there. Subsequent owners have added plunge pools, stained-glass windows, and riotous landscaping, but the property's three 18th-century villas retain the same sense of Mediterranean style meets Moorish fantasy, with domes, balconies, pillars, and pergola-topped terraces.
In the early years of the 20th century, the Sersale family of Naples kept a summer villa in Positano. After World War II, a new generation of Sersales hired an architect to unite the two parts of the family home, and Le Sirenuse was born. It has evolved over the decades, maintaining its position as the hotel of Positano, but it still gives visitors the sense of being a guest in a stylish, rambling home. The designs of Franco's Bar and Aldo's as well as the wonderful artifacts found throughout the hotel—from antique maps to a sedan chair in the lobby—are not the creations of a studio but reflections of the family's enthusiasms. At La Sponda, a stage set of a restaurant lit entirely by candles, dinner feels operatic.
Sorrento, on the other side of the Lattari Mountains facing Naples and Vesuvius, is an ideal place to stop on the way to or from the Amalfi Coast. The town has a Belle Époque atmosphere, with a string of fantastic hotels, the best of which is the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria, with terraces looking out onto Mount Vesuvius, spacious rooms of old-fashioned elegance, and sprawling gardens with a sumptuous pool and a world-class spa. Built in 1834 and still owned by the Neapolitan Fiorentino family, the hotel has hosted everyone from Enrico Caruso and Luciano Pavarotti to Marilyn Monroe. Its Michelin-starred restaurant, Terrazza Bosquet, is a true expression of the whole place: sophisticated and indulgent.
Where to eat
Visitors catch a boat from the dock in Positano to beach hangout Da Adolfo and linger over lunch, swimming between courses. Presided over by the formidable Signora Netta, trattoria Cumpa Cosimo in the back streets of Ravello is beloved for its simplicity and fabulous pizzas. Famous diners from Gore Vidal to Mariah Carey have stopped in over the years. Down a country lane from the coast road west of Sorrento, with a dozen tables under a raffia awning a few feet from the waves, Trattoria da Maria Grazia is a beach shack as dreamy as they come.
Set on a pier over the sea, with views of Monte San Costanzo, Lo Scoglio offers a menu of fresh fish caught each morning and loungers on its own beach for post-lunch siestas. Everyone seems to be a regular at La Tagliata, kissing the waiters on their way in. There's a set menu with a succession of wonderful dishes. The meat course consists of five different cuts straight from the open grill. A much-beloved vineyard perched high up in the Tramonti valley, Tenuta San Francesco, offers long lunches with a different vintage to accompany each course.
How to plan it
IC Bellagio can arrange private experiences on the Amalfi Coast, including cooking classes, vineyard visits, guided walks on the Sentiero degli Dei, fishing with locals in the Bay of Naples, and boat excursions in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
This article appeared in the July/August 2023 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
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