There is a fast way to see the Amalfi Coast and a right one, and they are not the same road. The fast way is the road, that thin grey ribbon of switchbacks and wing mirrors and coaches breathing down each other's necks, and it shows you everything while letting you feel almost none of it. The right way is slower and mostly blue. So I left the car where I had found it, learned the ferry timetable the way I once learned a train one, and let the coast arrive from the water, which is how it was always meant to be met.
I came in by sea, and I would beg you to do the same. From the deck of the morning ferry Positano does not so much appear as pour into view: a landslide of houses in peach and ochre and faded coral, stacked so steeply they seem to be holding one another up, the green-and-yellow dome of Santa Maria Assunta set at the bottom of it all like a full stop. There are no cars in the heart of the town because there is nowhere to put them. The only way through Positano is on foot and mostly downhill, which means that everything walked down in the morning is earned back at night.
I gave the first day to doing very little. The Spiaggia Grande is best early, before the umbrellas go up in their tidy ranks, and a swim out far enough shows you the town entire. Then the staircases: hundreds of them, the real pleasure of the place, threading between courtyards heavy with bougainvillea and lemon, past a cat asleep on a warm step and a grandmother lowering a basket on a rope to the grocer below. The famous lemons grow up there the size of fists, knotted into the terraces that hold the whole hillside together. By afternoon one had become a granita, a cold sharp thing eaten in the shade, and later, inevitably, a small glass of something stronger.
Slowness is not the absence of a plan here. It is the plan. I caught the boat, and then I let the afternoon catch me.
A short hop along the water brings you to Amalfi itself, which once, improbably, ran a maritime empire from this single fold in the cliffs, trading with Byzantium and writing the rule book that governed the Mediterranean for centuries. What remains is a town the size of a daydream and a cathedral far too grand for it: the Duomo di Sant'Andrea at the head of a long flight of steps, its facade a dazzle of stripe and arabesque, Norman and Arab and Byzantine all arguing politely on one wall. I climbed the steps for the cloister, then came back down and disappeared into the lanes behind the square, where the town narrows to a single cool corridor and the smell turns to fresh pasta and lemon and the river that still runs, hidden, beneath your feet. Ten minutes east on foot is Atrani, Amalfi's smaller, quieter twin, and most of a perfect Italian village was mine for an afternoon.
A bus winds the thousand feet from Amalfi to Ravello, and for one day I let it, because the town that waits at the top is a different and cooler country. Ravello sits on a saddle of rock with the whole coast laid out beneath it, and it has spent a thousand years being the place people came to think. The gardens are the reason: the Villa Rufolo, whose terrace of umbrella pines and falling flowers gave Wagner his enchanted garden, and the Villa Cimbrone, whose Terrace of Infinity ends in a row of marble busts and then, simply, in sky. Come for the summer festival and an orchestra plays on a stage built out over the drop, the violins and the sea working the same long evening light. I came on an ordinary day instead, and the only sound was wind in the pines and a far church bell, and that was enough.
One day belongs to a boat, and the trick is not to fill it. We hired a small wooden gozzo with a skipper from Amalfi and set out with no firmer plan than lunch. The coast I had been walking turned abruptly secret from the sea: caves the colour of a swimming pool, a waterfall dropping straight off the rock into the brine, coves with no road to them and therefore nobody in them. We pushed on to Capri while the water was kind and slipped between the Faraglioni, the three great stacks that rise out of the blue like the last teeth of a sunken mountain. We anchored somewhere with no name, I went in off the bow, and the engine fell quiet. This, more than any view from any terrace, is the coast at its truest: handsome, indifferent, and far older than the towns clinging to its edge.
The last evening belongs to a long table and no agenda at all. I ordered the lemon-bright spaghetti, the fish that had been swimming that morning, a carafe of cold white that cost less than the coffee does at home, and let the courses arrive at the pace the kitchen felt like sending them. The light went the way it always goes here, peach to gold to a violet that pools in the folds of the cliffs, and the lamps came on in the towns across the water one terrace at a time. Six nights is enough to learn the shape of this coast, and to know for certain I had taken it slowly enough. I had come to look at the Amalfi Coast. I left having let it set the pace.
