Amalfi Coast

Some sixty steep steps run from the square up to the church door. The striped front with its pointed arches was rebuilt in the nineteenth century. The remains of Saint Andrew are said to lie in the crypt. The cloister beside it takes a ticket.

Slim white columns paired under pointed arches make a cloister lifted straight out of Arab building. It began as the burial ground of the town's leading families, and fragments of old tombs still sit under the arches. On summer nights concerts are held in it.

Amalfi paper came from water wheels pounding rags, and the valley of the mills runs up behind the town. The museum turns a wheel and lifts a single sheet while you watch, and writing paper is still made that way and sold. Ruined mills line the stream above.

A garden on the very top of Ravello, where Wagner is said to have seen the stage scene he had been after. In summer a platform is built out over the sea for orchestral concerts, and being on a cliff edge it catches the wind. The garden is quiet in the morning.

White busts stand along the terrace rail in a line and the sea opens past them with nothing in the way. The village is ten minutes off along a lane, and the sign for it is small and easy to walk past. In the afternoon the light comes straight at you.

The whole village is stairs down a cliff, so anywhere you go is up or down. Carrying bags is hard enough that many pay a porter to the door, cars stop on the road above the houses, and the beach is shingle rather than sand.

A ridge path from Agerola to Nocelle that keeps the sea below you the whole way. Going eastward rather than west leaves less climbing, and the stairway down to Positano at the end runs well past a thousand steps. Little shade falls anywhere along it.

Seawater comes in through a gap in the rock and the light rises from below, and that is where the green comes from. You change into a small boat to enter, any swell at all cancels the day, and inside the boat never stops moving, so photographs blur.

If you travel badly, take a seat near the front of the bus. It is a cliff road of one bend after another, so two buses meeting means one of them reverses, and heading west out of Salerno puts the sea on your left. At midday in summer the boat is quicker.

Ten minutes around the cliff from Amalfi lies the next village, among the smallest in the country by area. The square is effectively the whole place, so by evening most of the residents are standing in it, and no coach can get in.

A narrow cleft in the cliffs, spanned by the coast road on a bridge. Steps beside the bridge drop to a few fishermen's houses and a pocket-sized pebble beach. Its houses are strewn so widely over the slopes that it is nicknamed the town that does not exist.

Out on the coast's eastern stretch, Cetara still sends a bluefin tuna fleet to sea. A Saracen watchtower guards one corner of the beach. Tourists are scarce; in the lane shops you pick anchovy sauce and jarred tuna next to locals.

A valley trail behind Amalfi town, with a stream running between ruined paper mills and ironworks. Deeper in, giant ferns that have survived since the Ice Age grow beside the waterfalls. The air in there is noticeably fresher than down by the sea.

The town with the longest sand beach on the Amalfi Coast. A 1954 flood swept the waterfront away, and the rebuilt seafront runs straight, unlike its neighbours. Beds here are cheaper than up in the cliff villages, so many choose it as a base.

The ceramic town at the coast's eastern end, where the dome of San Giovanni Battista is covered in yellow, green and blue tiles. Even shop walls and street signs are hand-painted tile. Buy plates or tiles and most shops will post them overseas.