Amalfi by Water: A Coast Designed to Be Seen From a Deck

The Amalfi Drive is a masterpiece with a parking problem. Forty kilometers of corniche shared by tour buses, Vespas and hesitation, and on an August afternoon the traffic moves slower than the boats below it. Now consider that every town on this coast was built facing the water, by people who arrived by water, and the conclusion writes itself. The coast has a service entrance and a grand entrance, and the grand one floats.

We have run guests along it in every month from May to October, and the pattern never changes. The first hour is spent photographing the road from below, with a certain pity. The rest of the week is spent forgetting it exists.

The day the sea gives you

Start with Capri, and start early. The island is fifteen miles off Positano and by ten in the morning the ferries have filled it; by eight it is still the place Roman emperors chose to retire. Come in from the east, past the Faraglioni rocks standing in water so clear you can see the anchor chain to the bottom, and send the tender to the Blue Grotto while the queue is still asleep. Inside, the light comes up through the water rather than down onto it, which is a sentence that does not make sense until you have seen it.

Then Nerano, for lunch. The bay of Marina del Cantone sits at the tip of the Sorrento peninsula and holds a handful of restaurants that can only be reached properly by boat. Lo Scoglio has a wooden pier where the tender ties up and a dish, spaghetti alla Nerano, of zucchini and provolone that people cross oceans for. Eat it at a table over the water with the yacht at anchor a hundred yards out. It is the kind of lunch that lasts until four and is remembered for decades.

This coast has a service entrance and a grand entrance, and the grand one floats.

Finish with Positano in the golden hour, when the cliff of pastel houses turns amber and every photograph looks staged. From the water the town reads as a single object, a stack of pink and ochre and white climbing the gorge, with the dome of Santa Maria Assunta glinting in the middle. Anchor off the main beach, swim before dinner, and go ashore by tender to a table on the sand. The people at the top of the hill spent two hours in traffic to see what you saw from a deck chair.

Anchorages as arias

What makes this coast a charter rather than a cruise is that every stop is twenty minutes from the next. The whole thing is an opera in short movements, and the anchorages are the arias.

Li Galli, three small islets just off Positano, are where the sirens allegedly sang to Ulysses, and they make a defensible claim to the best swim stop in Europe. The water between the rocks runs deep blue over white stone, the current keeps it clean, and on a weekday morning you may share it with one other boat. Anchor for an hour. Nobody will want to leave.

East along the coast, Conca dei Marini keeps the Emerald Grotto, smaller and less famous than Capri's blue one and green for the same reason in reverse. Amalfi itself deserves an afternoon for the cathedral steps and the paper mills. Atrani, next door, is the town the crowds forgot, a piazza the size of a living room with the sea at one end. Further on, Cetara sells the anchovy sauce the Romans called garum, and Vietri sells the ceramics that end up on every table on the coast.

The rhythm is the thing. Swim, tender ashore, eat, swim again, move. On land the coast is a queue punctuated by views. From the water it is a sequence of private moments strung together by a crew who knows which restaurant answers the phone and which cove is empty at noon.

Booking notes, briefly

July and August are glorious and dense; June and September are glorious and sane, with water still above seventy five degrees and towns that have their tables back. Ask about vessels based in Naples, Sorrento or Salerno so the charter begins on the coast rather than with a delivery leg from somewhere else. And insist on a crew that knows the lunch reservations that matter, because on this coast the galley can rest for a day. Italy will cater.

If Italy is on next summer's list, explore the fleet and ask about the Mediterranean season.