The Amalfi Coast is 50 kilometres of coastline where the Lattari Mountains drop almost vertically into the Tyrrhenian Sea. There is no shore to speak of and almost no flat ground, so the thirteen towns are stacked up the rock in tiers of pastel houses. Positano tumbles down its cliff in pink and ochre. Amalfi shelters around a striped cathedral at the head of a ravine. Ravello sits high on a ridge, with garden villas hanging over a thousand-foot drop. Between the towns, terraces of long thick-skinned Sfusato lemons climb the slopes on chestnut poles, farmed by hand because no machine can reach them. UNESCO listed the coast in 1997, and the reason was human work rather than wild scenery: people built towns and farms on a wall of stone above the sea. Amalfi itself was once a sea power to rival Venice, minting its own gold coins.
You see this coast best from above it and from the water. The SS163, a clifftop road cut into the rock in the mid-1800s, opens at every hairpin onto a new cove, village or lemon grove. From the sea the towns rise straight up from the waterline, and boats reach coves the road never touches. From the old mule paths above — the Path of the Gods above all — you look down on the whole coast at once, with Capri on the horizon. In the towns the air smells of salt, lemon and wood-oven bread, church domes glint with majolica tiles, and bougainvillea spills over the steps. The coast is no secret. In high summer the single road jams so badly that cars are rationed by number plate, and the ferry is usually quicker between towns. Come in the shoulder months and it eases: the light softens, the sea holds its warmth into October, and the chestnut woods behind turn gold.