Amalfi Coast
Discover Amalfi Coast
A concise introduction to Amalfi Coast, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
The Amalfi Coast is the southern shore of the Sorrentine peninsula, in the province of Salerno, running roughly fifty kilometres from Positano in the west to Vietri sul Mare in the east. It is not one place but thirteen municipalities strung along a mountainside, and the differences between them matter more than the short distances suggest.
Amalfi is the historic centre of gravity and the most practical base: it has the cathedral, the ferry dock and the bus interchange. Positano is the vertical, photogenic and most expensive one. Ravello sits high above the coast rather than on it, and is quieter and cooler for that reason.
The smaller places are where the coast is most itself: Atrani next door to Amalfi, Cetara still fishing, Vietri sul Mare making ceramics, and Praiano and Furore barely gathered into villages at all.
UNESCO inscribed the whole coast in 1997 as a cultural landscape — a designation about the relationship between the terrain and the way people have farmed and built on it, not about any one monument.