The Amalfi Coast Beyond the Postcard

Positano is worth a morning. Go early, walk the Via Positanesi d’America before the ferries arrive, order a granita, and leave by eleven. The town is beautiful and knows it; the rest of the coast is beautiful and hasn’t noticed.

We spent ten days without a car — a decision that felt reckless when booking and obvious by day two. The SITA buses are slow and the ferries are not, so we structured everything around the water. From Praiano you can reach Amalfi in fifteen minutes, Positano in twenty, and Capri before lunch if the sea is calm.

The pattern of the days settled quickly: swim before breakfast at Marina di Praia, walk somewhere in the late morning, eat too much at two, sleep, then take the last ferry somewhere for dinner. It is not an ambitious itinerary. It was the best week of the year.

Somewhere between the third swim and the second bottle of Falanghina, the coast stops being a place you photograph.

The villages worth two nights

Praiano for swimming and quiet. Atrani, five minutes from Amalfi on foot, for the sense of an actual town square. Furore for the fjord and the vertigo. Ravello for one long afternoon of gardens and, if the season is right, a concert with the sea below the stage.

Skip nothing on the Path of the Gods, but start from Bomerano and walk downhill toward Nocelle. Everyone tells you this; almost nobody does it. Bring more water than feels sensible and start before eight in July or August.

Where we actually ate

Family-run, no view, no linen: that is the formula. Il Pirata in Praiano has the view anyway. In Atrani, eat where the tables are on the square and the menu is a single laminated sheet. In Amalfi, walk fifteen minutes inland from the cathedral and prices halve.

Ten days later, on the bus back to Sorrento, we sat on the left. It turns out the view is fine from there too.