Amalfi Coast
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Costiera Amalfitana, 1997); SS163 Amalfitana Under ANAS · Amalfi, Campania
Forty kilometres of cliff road between Vietri sul Mare and Positano on the south side of the Sorrento peninsula, carved into the Lattari mountains in the 1840s, with a dozen fishing villages stacked in the ravines below it: Positano's pastel houses climbing from the beach, Amalfi with its striped cathedral and medieval maritime pride, Ravello on its terrace 350 metres above the sea, Cetara with its anchovy sauce, Vietri with its ceramics. UNESCO listed the whole coast in 1997 as a cultural landscape of lemon terraces and stone. The road is under six metres wide in places and simply cannot absorb summer, so from Easter to October cars are rationed by number plate on the busiest days and campers are banned outright. The answer is the SITA bus, the ferries from Salerno, Amalfi and Positano between April and October, and the Path of the Gods on foot above it all. It is expensive, crowded in July and August, and largely shut from November to March, and the spring and autumn shoulders are when it is the place the postcards promise.
Piazza Duomo, Amalfi, Campania, 84011, Italy
The road is open year-round with plate-based restrictions 10:00-18:00 on peak dates from Easter to 31 October. Ferries April to October, Salerno-Amalfi year-round. Villas in Ravello roughly 9:00-20:00 in season, shorter in winter; Amalfi cathedral circuit 9:00-19:45 in summer, 10:00-16:30 with a lunch break in winter; Grotta dello Smeraldo roughly 9:30-16:00, weather permitting.