How Was Amalfi Coast Built

The building tradition is Mediterranean and specific: thick whitewashed walls, small openings, and shallow barrel-vaulted roofs rather than timber ones. Vaults suited a place with lime and stone but little large timber, and they collect rainwater, which on porous limestone with few springs was the deciding factor.

Houses are stacked rather than laid out, each using the roof or terrace of the one below, and the circulation between them is stairs. Positano is the extreme case — a town with almost no horizontal street — but every village here works the same way, and the stepped paths remain the real network.

Amalfi’s cathedral shows where its money came from: a striped Arab-Norman facade, bronze doors cast in Constantinople in the eleventh century and shipped here, and the Cloister of Paradise with interlaced pointed arches that would not look out of place in Cairo.

The SS163 came last, cut into the cliff in the 1850s. It is the reason the coast is reachable and the reason it is congested, and it changed the geography of every town it passed through by giving them a front door.