Lemons and Light on the Amalfi Coast

The Vertigo of Arrival

The first thing the Amalfi Coast teaches you is that flatness is optional. The bus from Sorrento takes the Strada Statale 163 — a road that was clearly designed by someone who believed guardrails were for the unimaginative — and for ninety minutes you are swung around blind curves with a limestone cliff on one side and a sheer drop to the Tyrrhenian Sea on the other. Passengers grip armrests. The driver whistles. And through every window, at every turn, the view is so unreasonably beautiful that you forgive the road for trying to kill you.

Positano appears first, spilling down the cliffside like a waterfall of pastel plaster — pink, terracotta, cream, ochre — each building stacked on the one below it with the structural logic of a fever dream. Bougainvillea erupts from every wall and railing in violent magenta. The beach at the bottom is a grey crescent of volcanic sand, and the water beyond it is a blue so saturated it looks like someone has been adjusting the contrast on reality. I checked into a hotel that required climbing eighty-seven steps from the road. I counted. By the third day I had stopped counting and my calves had stopped complaining, and the view from the terrace — the entire coastline curving away toward Praiano, fishing boats dotting the water like white punctuation marks — had become the background to every morning coffee.

The lemons here are the size of softballs. They hang from pergolas that shade restaurant terraces and line the terraced groves that climb the hillsides in stacked rows of dark green. The locals use them for everything — limoncello, of course, but also lemon cake, lemon granita, lemon pasta, lemon soap, and a lemon salad dressed with nothing but olive oil and salt that is so simple and so perfect it made me briefly angry at every lemon I had ever eaten before.

The Boat to Capri

On the third morning I took a wooden fishing boat from Amalfi harbour to Capri. The captain was a man named Salvatore who had been making the crossing for forty years and who communicated primarily through hand gestures and cigarette smoke. The boat was small enough that the swells lifted it visibly, and the engine had a cough that Salvatore addressed by slapping the housing with an open palm, a technique that worked every time and that I have since tried on my laptop without success.

The crossing took two hours. Halfway across, the water changed. Not gradually — abruptly, as though someone had drawn a line on the surface of the sea. On one side, the deep navy of open water. On the other, a turquoise so vivid, so luminous, so absurdly, impossibly blue that I actually laughed. Salvatore grinned and pointed down. The seafloor was visible thirty feet below — white sand, dark rock, the shadows of fish moving in schools that shifted direction like a single organism. "Capri," he said, as though the word explained everything. It did.

We circled the island before landing, passing the Faraglioni sea stacks — three pillars of rock rising from the water like the ruins of a cathedral built by giants — and threading through the natural arch in the smallest of them while Salvatore cut the engine and let the current carry us through. The silence inside the arch was total. The water below was lit from beneath, the light reflecting off the white sand and turning the rock walls a pale, luminous green. For ten seconds we were inside something that felt less like geology and more like a held breath.

The Ceramics of Vietri sul Mare

At the southern end of the coast, where the cliffs begin to relax and the road finally stops pretending to be a mountain path, lies Vietri sul Mare — a town that has been making ceramics since the fifteenth century and that wears its craft on every surface. The church dome is tiled in green and yellow majolica. Staircases are inlaid with hand-painted tiles depicting lemons, fish, donkeys, saints. Shop facades display plates and bowls in colours that pulse against the white plaster walls like stained glass windows laid flat.

I spent an afternoon in a workshop where a woman named Lucia painted a plate with a design she had learned from her mother, who learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers. The pattern was a lemon branch — two yellow fruits against dark leaves on a white ground — and she painted it freehand, without guides or pencils, the brush moving with the casual confidence of someone who has made the same strokes ten thousand times. Each plate took twelve minutes. She made thirty a day. When I asked if she ever got bored, she looked at me as though I had asked whether the sea ever got bored of being blue.

I bought three plates and carried them back to my hotel wrapped in newspaper, climbing the eighty-seven steps with the package under my arm, and placed them on the terrace table where they looked, against the backdrop of the coast and the water and the lemon grove next door, as though they had always been there. Everything on the Amalfi Coast looks as though it has always been there. The buildings, the boats, the terraces, the fruit — they have the quality of permanence that comes not from being old but from being exactly right.

The Golden Hour in Ravello

Ravello sits above the coast rather than on it — a town perched at three hundred and sixty metres, looking down on the road and the sea and the other villages as though it has decided to observe rather than participate. It is quieter here. The day-trippers who swarm Positano and Amalfi rarely make the climb, and by late afternoon the Piazza Duomo is nearly empty, the cafes occupied by a handful of locals and the occasional visitor who has discovered that Ravello at sunset is the coast's best-kept open secret.

I sat on the terrace of a bar with a glass of Falanghina — the local white wine, cold, mineral, tasting faintly of the limestone it grew from — and watched the coastline perform its evening transformation. The sun dropped toward the water and the light went from white to gold to amber, and the cliffs and villages below began to glow as though lit from within. The sea turned from blue to copper. The lemon terraces, still visible on the hillside across the valley, caught the last light and held it. A church bell rang somewhere below, the sound rising up the cliff face and arriving softened by distance, as though it had been filtered through the warm air on its way up.

Gore Vidal lived in Ravello for decades. He called it the most beautiful place he had ever seen. Wagner composed parts of Parsifal here. The garden at Villa Rufolo, which I visited earlier that afternoon, has a terrace that drops away into nothing — just sky and sea and the faintest suggestion of the African coast two hundred miles south. Standing at its edge, I understood why artists come here and stay. The Amalfi Coast is beautiful everywhere, but Ravello is where the beauty becomes contemplative. It is where you stop photographing and start remembering. It is where you sit with a glass of wine and watch the gold dissolve into the water and think: every meal I have eaten this week has been the best meal of my life, and I am not even slightly exaggerating.