Amalfi and Sorrento - Part 1
Life on the vertical. That is one way of describing the stunning Amalfi coast. Other words are a waste of time here, because everyone has heard of Italy’s mountainous World Heritage shoreline which grandstands its way south of the Sorrento Peninsula.
That great finger of rock itself is dramatic enough - terminating, as it does, the massive, blue, Vesuvius-dominated, sweep south of the Bay of Naples. But around the corner - around the massive limestone crags where the Sirens used to lure their sailor pray - you come to the vertiginous littoral that has been attracting mankind for millennia.
Which might seem strange to anyone whose world is more horizontal than vertical. To a person from plains, fenlands or river deltas, the proposition of surviving - let alone flourishing - in such an abruptly steep place would seem impossible.
But people have been clinging to these maritime cliffs and gorges for thousands of years, and a rather enviable time they’ve had of it compared to the historic lives of many local civilisations. There is plenty of fertility in the tiny pockets of more level land which have collected the fertile volcanic soils - and lemons, grapes and just about anything else vegetal that you can plant, including tomatoes and aubergines, seem almost to leap out of the sun-warmed canyons and defiles.
Linking these pockets of land, and the villages and hamlets that go with them, are ancient packhorse trails which weave their way up from seaside to mountain-top - often in a seemingly impossible and overly optimistic series of switchbacks and tucks and turns. But somehow these old pathways - laid, in many cases, by the Romans - pull off the impossible and get you either to the top of the crags, or to some hidden beach far from the madding summer crowds.
They are public rights-of-way that most visitors never see and probably do not even dream exist. The tourist buses go chundering along the famous twisting and turning single road that links the towns of Positano, Amalfi and Salerno and passengers oooh and aaah at the terrifying drops below them rather than look upwards into the mountains. If they do look upwards, they’ll find it hard to imagine that paths wend their way up into the great clefts, or that hiking along them can be a hugely enjoyable thing to do.
I once enjoyed a trip there with Rambler Worldwide Holidays, which organises a week-long tour that embraces both of these worlds. In other words, a vacation that gives you plenty of chances to ride on buses and do a bit of vertical sightseeing with all the other tourists - and also explore the extraordinary landscape in more depth by striding out along some of the paths.
Taken as an entire weeklong experience, this allows you to enjoy one of the world’s most beautiful holiday hotspots in a way that affords a much more satisfying, more interesting, holiday than if you were to stick to the well-travelled tourist trail. You begin to understand how life on the vertical works, how it has flourished down through the ages, and how local farmers and fishermen have adapted to the modern world.
Oh, and you are treated to much, much, better views than the ones you can enjoy from the overcrowded lay-bys where the luxury coaches stop for ten minutes.
If all this talk of abysses and vertiginous mountainsides is enough to scare the living daylights out of you, then please note that the old Roman road-makers who paved the donkey trails were masters at civil engineering - indeed, it is an intellectual treat to walk along their safe secure paved tracks that somehow avoid sheer cliffs and terrifying drops.
For those who haven’t been there, we’d better offer a brief explanation of the local geography because - despite being world famous - it does come as a bit of a surprise. Where the Bay of Naples sweeps south it veers abruptly west to come to its final, rocky, lands-end near a town called Marciano. This mountainous finger - which points a few miles across the Mediterranean to the Isle of Capri - is the Sorrento Peninsula.
But then what the Amalfi Coast does is to change violently in direction to sweep back inland in an easterly march as it creates the northern shores of the Gulf of Salerno. this is the section known as the Amalfi Coast. And what this means is that if you were to climb the mountains - either from the Sorrento side or from the Amalfi side - you’d actually find yourself looking down onto yet more sea once your reached the top and looked over the other side.
This comes as a bit of surprise if you go there before studying a local map. And it is a fabulous revelation of the kind only slender peninsulas or thin islands can give. And, indeed, a surprise of panoramic proportions that you can enjoy on the holiday.
