The Amalfi Coast (Costiera Amalfitana) is a strip of steep shoreline on the Gulf of Salerno, in the province of Salerno in Campania, southern Italy, and UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1997, one of ten Italian sites added at the World Heritage Committee's 21st session, held in Naples. The listed area takes in thirteen municipalities, from Positano in the west to Vietri sul Mare in the east, strung along the southern face of the Sorrentine Peninsula where the limestone Lattari Mountains drop straight into the Tyrrhenian Sea. What UNESCO protects is not a single monument but a whole worked landscape: cliff-hung towns, terraced lemon gardens and the medieval buildings left behind by the Duchy of Amalfi, a sea power that traded with Constantinople and Fatimid Egypt a thousand years ago.
Almost everything a visitor sees today was laid down in a handful of distinct phases, so the story below runs in order, date by date.
339–839: A Roman trading post becomes a Byzantine outpost
Settlement on this shore is far older than the town of Amalfi. Excavations at Positano show hunter-gatherers using the Grotta La Porta cave in the Upper Palaeolithic, and from about 100 BC wealthy Romans built seaside villas in the bay; the remains of one, first described by Karl Weber in 1758, now lie under the Oratory of Santa Maria Assunta and opened to the public as a museum in July 2018.
Amalfi itself is recorded as a trading post from 339, and it had its own bishop by 596. Through the early Middle Ages the town sat inside the Byzantine Duchy of Naples, governed at a distance and squeezed between Greek and Lombard power. Its geography was both its protection and its limit. The town lies at the mouth of a deep ravine below Monte Cerreto, 1,315 m (4,314 ft) high, with almost no flat land and no easy road inland. That forced its people onto the water. Ravello, on a ridge above Atrani, was founded in the 5th century as a refuge from the invasions that ended the Western Roman Empire.
839–1073: The Duchy of Amalfi trades with Constantinople and Cairo
The turning point came in 838, when Sicard of Benevento captured Amalfi with the help of traitors who let his men through the sea defences. In 839 the Amalfitans threw off Lombard rule and elected a prefect of their own, and they never returned to Neapolitan control. In 958 the prefect Mastalus II was assassinated and Sergius I became the first duke, or doge. Between 981 and 983 Amalfi even ruled the neighbouring Principality of Salerno.
The duchy's wealth came from a three-way trade. Amalfitan ships carried grain, timber and Sardinian salt to Islamic ports, sold them for gold dinars minted in Egypt and Syria, and spent the gold on Byzantine silks to resell in the West. Merchants here were buying land with gold coins in the 9th century while most of Italy still bartered. Amalfi kept a permanent community in Constantinople, and from 909 it traded so heavily with the Fatimid Caliphate that in 915 it stayed out of the Christian league that fought the Arabs at the Battle of the Garigliano, most likely to protect that trade. Around 1040 Amalfitans also founded Latin outposts in the Levant and hostels for pilgrims in Jerusalem and Antioch; Benedictine monks from Amalfi founded what became the Knights Hospitaller, whose eight-pointed cross later became known as the Maltese cross.
At its height, around the turn of the millennium under Duke Manso I (966–1004), the town held somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 people, depending on the estimate. The Arab traveller Ibn Hawqal, writing in 977, called it the most prosperous, noble and opulent city of Lombardy, more important than Naples next door. Ravello grew alongside it, dyeing wool from its hinterland, and in the 12th century still had about 25,000 inhabitants.
The duchy's richest surviving monument is Amalfi Cathedral, dedicated to Saint Andrew. Its first church was built in the 9th century and a second added beside it in the 10th; the bronze doors were cast in Constantinople before 1066 and signed by Simeon of Syria, the earliest post-Roman bronze doors made for Italy. The bell tower, begun in 1180 and finished more than a century later, is capped with brightly coloured majolica tiles in the Arab-Norman style. On the waterfront, the vaulted halls of the Arsenal of the Republic built and repaired the duchy's war galleys, among the largest in the early medieval Mediterranean; ten piers still stand of an original twenty-two.
1073–1137: Robert Guiscard, Roger II and the Pisan sacks
Independence ended in stages. In 1073 the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard took the town and styled himself duke of the Amalfitans, though Amalfi kept many of its rights. The Normans used ecclesiastical politics to weaken it, too: in 1086, at the request of Count Roger Borsa, Pope Victor III gave Ravello its own diocese, carved out of Amalfi's archdiocese. Amalfi revolted in 1096 and was put down in 1101. It rose again in 1130 and was subdued the next year by Roger II of Sicily, whose admiral George of Antioch blockaded the town from a base on Capri.
The final blows came from a trading rival. Pisa, allied with Emperor Lothair, sacked Amalfi in 1135 and again in 1137, carrying off a copy of Justinian's Pandects as booty. The duchy never regained its independence, and Venice, Genoa and Pisa took over the long-distance trade Amalfi had pioneered. Yet the town's legal legacy outlived its fleet: the Tabula Amalfitana, a code of maritime law, was recognised in Mediterranean ports until 1570.
Amalfi's later reputation for the mariner's compass belongs to this afterlife. Tradition credits a local sailor, Flavio Gioia, with perfecting the boxed compass around 1300, but historians think the name comes from a misread Latin sentence of 1511 and that Gioia may never have existed. The safer claim is the one the 15th-century historian Flavio Biondo made: that the compass came into use in Amalfi. The town's Compass Museum, opened in the arsenal in December 2010, presents that story.
1203–1343: Relics from Constantinople, then the sea takes the port
Even in decline, Amalfi's churchmen kept Eastern connections. After the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, Cardinal Pietro Capuano brought relics of Saint Andrew to Amalfi in 1206, and the crypt built for them was completed in 1208. The Paradise Cloister was added in the 13th century in Arab-Norman style. Up the hill, the Rufolo family, one of Ravello's richest merchant houses, began Villa Rufolo around 1270; Boccaccio later put a Landolfo Rufolo into the Decameron. In 1272 Nicolò di Bartolomeo of Foggia made the Pulpit of the Gospels that still stands in the nave of Ravello Cathedral.
The physical end of medieval Amalfi came in 1343, when a seaquake and storm destroyed the harbour and the lower town. The arsenal's surviving aisles are the part that escaped. After 1343 Amalfi never rose above local importance, and the coast settled into centuries of fishing, papermaking and small trade. Positano prospered as a market port in the 16th and 17th centuries, but by the mid-19th century more than half its people had emigrated, mostly to the Americas.
1810s–1953: Converted convents, Wagner in Ravello and Steinbeck's Positano
Tourism here has a long pedigree. In the second decade of the 19th century the Luna Convento in Amalfi became a hotel, and the Cappuccini Convento followed in the 1880s. In the Edwardian era British upper-class families wintered in Amalfi, and both Henrik Ibsen and Richard Wagner finished work while staying there.
Wagner's visit left the deepest mark. In 1880 he toured Villa Rufolo, by then restored by the Scotsman Francis Neville Reid, and took its gardens as his model for the magic garden of Klingsor in the second act of Parsifal. The Ravello Festival, started in 1953 in his honour, still holds concerts in the villa's lower garden. Later visitors to Ravello included M. C. Escher, Virginia Woolf, Greta Garbo and Gore Vidal, who kept the cliffside villa La Rondinaia until 2004.
The cathedral got its present face in this period too. Part of the old facade collapsed in 1861, and the architect Errico Alvino rebuilt it in striped marble and stone, with a mosaic of the Triumph of Christ by Domenico Morelli; it was completed in 1891. Positano, meanwhile, was a poor fishing village until John Steinbeck's essay "Positano Bites Deep" appeared in Harper's Bazaar in May 1953 and drew visitors in large numbers through the 1950s.
1997 onward: Thirteen municipalities on the World Heritage List
When UNESCO inscribed the Costiera Amalfitana in 1997, it was listing a landscape shaped by these phases together: medieval towns on the few usable ledges, monasteries and merchant villas above them, and slopes cut into terraces to grow crops on ground that would otherwise be bare rock. Italy now has 62 World Heritage Sites, more than any other country, and the Amalfi Coast is listed as a whole stretch of coastline rather than a single city centre or monument.
The terraces are still in use. They grow the sfusato amalfitano lemon used for limoncello, made between February and October, while Tramonti makes the herbal liqueur concerto, Cetara cures anchovies and Vietri sul Mare produces painted ceramics. Amalfi is also known for bambagina, a thick handmade paper once used for legal acts and revenue stamps; the town was one of the first paper-making centres in Europe, having learned the craft from the Arabs, and the Museo della Carta in its Mill Valley tells that story.
The same steep ground that made the coast worth listing also makes it hard to live with. The main road is the Amalfi Drive, the SS163 state highway, cut into the cliffs for most of its 50 km between Sorrento and Amalfi, and the drive from Salerno to Positano is about 80 km. Atrani, squeezed into the Dragone valley next to Amalfi, covers just 12 hectares, the smallest municipality in Italy. Buses and ferries run along the coast, and the nearest airport is Salerno Costa d'Amalfi, though most international arrivals still come through Naples.
The coast fits into a wider pattern of Italian World Heritage landscapes that combine terraces, villages and sea; the closest comparison is the Cinque Terre on the Ligurian coast, while the city that eventually eclipsed Amalfi's trade is covered in our guide to Venice and its lagoon. For timing a trip around the summer crowds on the SS163, see the best time to visit Italy.