The Amalfi Coast has become, in the way of all places too frequently photographed, a victim of its own beauty. The pastel villages still tumble toward the Tyrrhenian Sea with cinematic grandeur, but the roads are gridlocked with tour buses, the restaurants serve to turnover rather than taste, and the experience of standing on a terrace in Ravello at sunset is now shared with several hundred fellow pilgrims, all filming vertically. It is time, perhaps, to look elsewhere — and the elsewhere is closer than you think.
The Cilento Coast
South of Salerno, where the tourist maps grow vague and the autostrada gives way to winding coastal roads shaded by maritime pines, lies the Cilento — a UNESCO-protected stretch of coastline that possesses all of the Amalfi's drama and none of its crowds. The fishing village of Acciaroli, where Ernest Hemingway reportedly found inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea, remains a place of working boats, hand-thrown nets, and trattorias where the catch arrives at your table within hours of leaving the water. The beaches of Palinuro, framed by sea caves and natural arches, rival anything in Capri.
"The Cilento is what the Amalfi Coast was forty years ago — before the world discovered it and loved it nearly to death."
Where to Stay
Accommodation in the Cilento tends toward the familial rather than the corporate. At Il Cannito, a nine-room hotel carved into the cliffs above Santa Maria di Castellabate, the owner serves limoncello made from lemons grown on the terrace where you take breakfast. At Palazzo Belmonte, a seventeenth-century hunting lodge turned seaside estate, you swim in a pool set within a walled garden of bougainvillea and citrus, the sea visible through gaps in the ancient stone. These are not luxury hotels in the conventional sense — they are places where luxury means being treated as a guest rather than a customer.
Italy's secret riviera asks only one thing of its visitors: that they arrive without expectations and leave without posting coordinates. The Cilento's magic lies in its anonymity, and those who discover it tend to guard the secret with the possessiveness of someone who has found, at last, the Italy they always imagined but feared no longer existed.
