Wish we were here: Amalfi Coast
A few years ago, after finishing university, with three friends (a cosmopolitan bunch – a Scotsman, a Frenchman, an Englishman and an Italian) I took a holiday on the Amalfi Coast. We stayed in Raito, a little village above Vietri, famous for its pottery and glass-making, just north of Salerno. Our host was Eva Cantarella, an academic notable for her work on sexuality in the ancient world. She lives in a villa which faces over the Gulf of Salerno, offering an astonishing panorama of the sea and the city to the South.
She lent us her bashed up Volkswagen to get around and the run of the place. The nights were spent merrily playing Neapolitan card games, listening to music and drinking – the dark curve of the bay silhouetted by a golden band of light, the bustling port of Salerno and its street lamps.
We sped around in the bashed up Volkswagen (by the end of the trip our designated driver was gesticulating, honking, effing and blinding as enthusiastically as any of the locals), winding through the little villages dotted along the coast. There is preserved an old-fashioned atmosphere with quiet beaches, paths down to the sea and quiet restaurants. If party bling is your thing, you can find it at Positano, which has been rather ruined by tourism.
Our soundtrack was a local radio station and we soon found out that soaring Italian pop tunes offer an excellent background to driving.
Things to do:
Swimming
There is nothing more pleasurable than pushing back into the water, head back, and surveying the precipices, houses nestled in higher up valleys and the deep blue sky.
Ruins at Paestum
More beautiful than Pompeii and Herculaneum to the north, Paestum has extraordinarily well-preserved temples dedicated to Hera and Athena with all of their columns intact. Because they are less well-known and far away from other tourist spots, they are not very busy at all. So you can sort of feel like you’re a visitor from an older time, during the era of the Grand Tour or the 19th century era of excavation, discovering the beauties of antiquity when they were fresh and new.
Food
Just about every restaurant is incredibly pleasant and relatively inexpensive. So if you fancy inhaling industrial quantities of pasta (like me), you have plenty of options.
