View from our balcony, Positano
Take the cliffs of Yosemite, add some charming houses and ancient churches, put the whole thing at the beach, and you have the Amalfi Coast. It is stunningly beautiful. Of course, every beautiful place in Italy seems to be built on a steep hill, so once again there are many stairs to climb. I am building big, strong thighs from all this climbing. (No, the big thighs are from all the pasta.)
We took a boat from Positano to the town of Amalfi, a lovely trip along the coast. There we walked the narrow main street filled with people mixed with occasional scooters, cars and buses. A few times we had to throw ourselves against the shop walls to keep from getting run over. This is good practice for Naples, which we hear is a traffic free-for-all. When we weren’t dodging scooters we admired the majolica tile that is a tradition here and ate gelato (four gelato stores in a row and another right across the street).
Back in Positano we went below the church to see the remains of a sumptuous Roman villa with elaborate frescoes, buried by the same eruption of Vesuvius that took out Pompeii. Above that was the medieval church and above that the Renaissance church that is used today. Amazing layers of history throughout the entire region.