Amalfi Coast historical timeline

Amalfi was an independent maritime republic from the ninth century, trading across the Mediterranean with Byzantium, North Africa and the Levant at a time when most of Europe did not trade at all. It is counted with Venice, Genoa and Pisa as one of the four, and its maritime code — the Tavole Amalfitane — was used across the region for centuries.

Its decline was fast. Pisa sacked it twice in the 1130s, and a storm in 1343 destroyed much of the lower town and harbour outright. What had been a trading power became a set of villages living on fishing, lemons and paper.

Paper is the surviving industry of that era: Amalfi learned it from the Arab world and was making it by the thirteenth century, in mills driven by the stream in the valley behind the town. One still operates as a museum.

The coast was effectively inaccessible by land until the Bourbon government cut the coast road in the 1850s. Foreign visitors followed — Wagner found the setting for Parsifal’s magic garden at Villa Rufolo in 1880, and the writers and composers who came after made Ravello a destination before the beaches were one.