The Timeless Allure of the Amalfi Coast

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All places have narratives: a back catalog of plot. On the Amalfi Coast, one of the most quintessentially Italian places in Italy, there are stories of the visiting Greeks and the temples they built and filled with lithe sculptures; the Arabs and their colored tile work; the Normans, nervously building watchtowers in case the Saracens turned up; the medieval fleets of Amalfi itself, commanding the Mediterranean and sailing home with cargoes of silver and lemon-tree saplings. There is the myth of Odysseus, ghosting past the sirens, and the tales of celebrities coming south from Rome in the 1950s and 1960s: people such as Franco Zeffirelli, John Steinbeck, and Jackie Kennedy, astonished by the sheer gorgeousness of the area and how blissfully separate it was from any place or any life they knew.

A narrow, acrobatic road hugs the cliffs, disorienting people unaccustomed to driving within a couple of inches of someone else’s side-view mirror. At each bend, there’s another sharp intake of breath, another panoramic view, another story waiting to be told. Amalfi’s renowned beauty can seem unreal: a barely credible conjunction of sea, sky, and mountains. Beneath the cliffs, the land swoons down through a tumult of rock, blossoms, pine trees, and villas to a shore indented with bays. Seen from above, the sea is always the most extraordinary blue, its surface patterned with winds and cloud shadows, the wakes of pleasure boats scrolling behind like vapor trails.

Some years ago I had lunch here with Isabella Quarantotti, the widow of the great Neapolitan playwright Eduardo de Filippo. Well into her 70s, Isabella was an intense, sprite-like figure. It was June, the sun warm, grapes budding among the leaves on trellised vines above us. On a terrace table were plates of prosciutto, burrata, and velvet-soft figs. Across the bay was Positano, named after the Greek god Poseidon, the tiled dome of its church presenting a moment of symmetry and order among the puzzle of houses tumbling down from that mad road.

Isabella, who had been coming to Positano for years, reminisced about the cobblers who sewed sandals on the beach, the fishermen unloading buckets of silvery anchovies at the dock, and the powerful matriarchy of black-clad women who, she claimed, ruled the town. In that same time, she recalled, you might have run into Maria Callas, Sophia Loren, or Rudolf Nureyev.

Gesticulating airily at the islands of Li Galli, distant silhouettes in a silver sea, Isabella talked about Nureyev and Odysseus as if they might have been neighbors. Nureyev used to own the only villa on the islands. She remembered his picnics: the cushions, the long banners of silk draped between the trees. As for Odysseus, it was from Li Galli, she said, that the sirens called to him.