The Amalfi Coast

Forty kilometres of cliff, lemon terrace and pale church dome — and four places within it that could not be less alike.

Positano is the photograph everyone arrives with: a vertical town of bougainvillea and pastel façades tipping into the sea, its beach clubs and boat traffic the coast at its most cinematic and most social. It is glamour with a staircase attached, and the hotel you choose becomes half the trip.

Ravello sits three hundred and fifty metres above all of that, and feels like a different country for it — villa gardens, long silences, evenings several degrees cooler than the shoreline. Amalfi, between them, is the working town: a cathedral, a real piazza, and the ferry hub that lets you move along the coast by sea rather than by road.

And Capri, thirty minutes offshore, runs on its own clock entirely — a place to be arrived at late in the afternoon and woken up on, never a midday excursion. How these four fit together, and in which week, is the whole art of planning this coast.