The Amalfi Coast, which has always been a land of sailors and inventors but also the inspiration for poets, writers and great composers. I propose a journey among these lands, true paintings framed by an indigo sky and an emerald sea, seen through the eyes of distinguished visitors.
The coastline was chosen as a location by Roberto Rossellini for some of the most famous films such as “Paisà” (1964), “The Miracle” (1946), “The Bad Guy Killing Machine” (1952) and
“Journey to Italy”
(1953).
The director has found in his small towns the prefect theater to stage his works.
Ravello, a town situated on a steep cliff at an altitude of 315 m asl and overlooking Maiori, hosted the actress Greta Garbo (who had stayed there in 1936, living out her love affair with Stokowski at Villa Cimbrone), called it “The most beautiful place I have ever seen.” (the most beautiful place I have seen in my life).
Also linked to Ravello is Richard Wagner and his “Parsifal,” one of his most important works. One morning in 1880, the composer, reaching the terrace of Villa Cimbrone, in a whisper said: “Here is found the magical garden of Klingsor!” . The villa’s gardens, towers, trees and the sea in the distance thus become a worthy setting for his work.
Queen of the coast is Amalfi, an ancient maritime republic that was the birthplace of sailor Flavio Gioia, inventor, according to some historians, of the compass. English writer Osbert Sitwell returning from a trip to these lands, declared: “Those who have not seen Amalfi, do not know Italy.” raising Amalfi to an emblem of the wonders the country has to offer.
Fortunate are the inhabitants of Amalfi to whom an inscription on one of the ancient gates reminds them every day that they live in a “paradise on earth, so much so that […] the moment they die and go to heaven, nothing will change for them.” .
The poet Quasimodo wrote a poem about it the Praise of Amalfi:
THIS IS THE GARDEN
WE ALWAYS AND FUTILELY SEEK AFTER THE PERFECT PLACES OF CHILDHOOD.
A MEMORY THAT OCCURS TANGIBLY ABOVE THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA,
SUSPENDED ON THE LEAVES OF THE LAVISH ORANGE AND CEDAR TREES
IN THE HANGING GARDENS OF CONVENTS.
Quasimodo
At the beginning of the Path of the Gods in Agerola, Bomerano, there is now a Vietri ceramic plaque with two citations:
“ Starting right from the Path of the Gods from that road suspended over the magical Gulf of the Sirens, furrowed even today by memory and myth.”
Italo Calvino
“This is the landscape that, from the top of the Path of the Gods, opened up to our gaze: it is the scenery of that extreme bend of the Amalfi Coast looking westward, toward the island of Capri, that steep, sultry coastline with crystalline mountains where today’s gods are abandoned and a lost, Mediterranean, anterior self is again discovered.”
David Herbert Lawrence
This was followed by many poets, singers and artists describing the beauty of the Amalfi Coast and the Sorrento Peninsula
The Amalfi Coast is a terrace on infinity.
Fabrizio Caramagna
The Amalfi Coast is the most beautiful coastline in the world.
Renzo Arbore
The Amalfi coast is a dream place that doesn’t seem real
Alberto Moravia
The Amalfi Coast is a Paradise, made up of staircases that resonate like keys on an old piano.
Conrad Alvaro
Positano is a Capri for people in a quieter mood. Amalfi, which, everyone knows, was the oldest of our maritime republics, is a lively town with loquacious barbershops working late into the night, winding streets, a beautiful cathedral, and some aristocratic houses.
Guido Piovene
The Amalfi Coast is not just a place, but a state of mind that is tattooed in your memory.
Fabrizio Caramagna
Nowhere else as in Amalfi does the intersection of land and water occur with a mutual metamorphosis.
Salvatore Quasimodo
One of the beauties of Sorrento are the walled citrus gardens. Walking through the city, one can glimpse the branches laden with oranges and lemons, surmounting the stone walls. Sorrento has an open facade overlooking the sea, but the interior is secret. It begins, going southward, the Arab-medieval section of Campania.
Guido Piovene
The area south of Naples, below Mount Vesuvius, is a gentle, light landscape where everything seems dissolved in Roman and Greek myths and history. In contrast, the coast from Sorrento to Salerno, with Amalfi as its center, is medieval, romantic, monastery-like.
Guido Piovene
It is believed that the navy from Reggio to Gaeta is almost the most delightful part of Italy; in which, very near Salerno, there is a coast over ‘l sea concerning, which the inhabitants call the Amalfi Coast, full of small towns, gardens and fountains, and of rich and procuring men in the act of mercantile business.
Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron
The Amalfi Coast is lemons and orange groves, jagged cliffs and lonely little beaches, pastel-colored fishing villages and houses wedged between rocks, medieval monasteries and terraces.
Fabrizio Caramagna
Between Sorrento and Salerno you see sheer cut rocks, horrid clefts the mountains, houses wedged and flattened on the rock from which only the color distinguishes them, falls of vineyards on impervious slopes, and the monasteries-fortresses perched halfway up the coast.
Guido Piovene
Doomsday, for Amalekites going to heaven, will be a day like any other.
Renato Fucini
Here, in this place in the world that is not of this world, where every look is already emotion and every thought is already a dream, here you can.
Writing on the wall in Furore
Positano strikes a deep chord. It is a dream place that doesn’t seem real to you until you are there but whose deep reality you feel with nostalgia when you have left it.
John Steinbeck
Between Amalfi and Positano…with the sky for a hat and a heart suspended over the blue sea.
Anonymous
Amalfi coast prouma of lemons, sea and infinity
Fabrizio Caramagna
Climbing the stairs to Amalfi Cathedral is like being born again and again and never in the same way.
Fabrizio Caramagna
More trips are made by wandering the lanes of Amalfi than by visiting entire nations.
Fabrizio Caramagna
Here where the sea shimmers
Lucio Dalla
And it pulls hard on the wind
On an old terrace
In front of the Gulf of Surriento.
Ravello is a town with an Arab-Sicilian style. Wandering through the narrow streets of Ravello, one gets a foretaste of Palermo, as this small town, Arab-Norman and Orientalizing in style, is a miniature Palermo in the shelter of the mountains.
Guido Piovene
It smelled of whitewash, of strawberry,
Alfonso Gatto
the coast of Cetara and d’Erchie rises
In the memory, weaves the walls, stuffs
citrus arbors: for stairs.
Of the mountains towers the white of houses.
The road from Vietri to Capodorso
Alfonso Gatto
In Minori, in Amalfi it goes up and down
toward the sea of Conca and Furore
Is mountain road: there surrenders
The light that in drawing it from hump to hump
To its constructive cloves find the flower
Of the deserted pavement, the broom.
Summer is nice if you don’t have to work and especially if you have a villa in Positano and a piece of beach without people.
Giulia Ciarapica
The Amalfi Coast is a cliff of houses from the mountain on the coast, and it is in these inland landscapes that plummet to the sea that we find an intensity of forms formed by the terraces with which these landscapes are built.
Don McCullin
The Amalfi Coast is an emerging example of a Mediterranean landscape with exceptional values for the cultural and natural environment resulting from dramatic morphology and historical evolution.
Rationale for listing the Amalfi Coast as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
