The Quiet Coast of the Amalfi Hinterland

The Amalfi Coast has, in high summer, become a victim of its own beauty. The famous towns clinging to the cliffs are magnificent, but they are also choked, their single coastal road a slow-moving jam and their photogenic corners three deep in visitors. What almost nobody does is look up. Above and behind the celebrated seafront lies a hinterland of terraced villages, lemon groves and ancient mountain paths where the crowds never reach and the old rhythm of the coast survives intact. To travel this quieter country, on foot and slowly, is to find the Amalfi that the day-trippers speed past below.

Where the crowds are not

The pressure on the Amalfi Coast is concentrated in a handful of famous places and along one road. Step back from that thin strip of celebrity and the landscape opens up. The hills behind rise steeply into a world of small farming villages, chestnut woods and vertiginous terraces where lemons and vines have been grown for centuries. These places are minutes from the tourist crush as the crow flies, but a world away in feeling, still lived in by people whose families have worked these slopes for generations.

This is the coast rewarding the traveller willing to make a little effort, the same principle that governs any good slow weekend away: the beauty is not gone, it has simply moved uphill and out of the guidebooks. A base in one of these upper villages puts the famous coast within reach for a morning while giving you somewhere peaceful to return to each night.

The footpaths in the sky

The great secret of the Amalfi hinterland is its network of ancient paths. Long before the coastal road was blasted out of the cliffs, the villages were linked by stone mule tracks and stairways cut into the mountainside, and many survive as walking routes today. These paths climb through lemon terraces and chestnut woods, contour along the tops of the cliffs with the sea shimmering far below, and connect villages that most visitors never see. Walking them is the single best way to experience the coast, and it is almost entirely free of crowds.

A few kinds of walk stand out:

• The high traverse — a level path along the clifftops with the sea spread out beneath.
• The village-to-village track — an old mule path linking two hill settlements through the terraces.
• The lemon-grove descent — a stairway down through the groves to a quieter cove.
• The woodland climb — up into the chestnut forests above the cultivated slopes.

You do not need to be a serious walker to enjoy these; many are short and can be broken up with a long lunch. Building a few days around walking rather than sightseeing is exactly the kind of thoughtful planning a good slow travel itinerary is made for, and it transforms the Amalfi from a place you fight through into one you move through gently.

The Amalfi Coast’s beauty did not vanish under the crowds. It simply climbed the hill behind, into the villages and the groves, and waited for anyone willing to walk up after it.

The lemons deserve a mention of their own, because they are not incidental to this landscape but the reason much of it exists. The terraces that stripe the hillsides above the coast were built over centuries specifically to grow the region’s famous large, thick-skinned lemons, and the pergolas of chestnut poles that shade them are a distinctive feature of the whole area. Walking through these groves in the growing season, with the heavy fruit hanging overhead and the sharp citrus scent in the air, is one of the sensory pleasures the coast keeps for those who climb up into it. The lemons appear everywhere once you start looking, in the food, in the local liqueur, in the ceramics, and understanding their central place in the local economy explains the shape of the landscape itself: those improbable terraces were not built for the view but for the harvest, and the beauty is a by-product of centuries of patient agricultural work.

The food of the terraces

The hinterland eats differently from the seafront. Up in the villages the cooking is of the mountains as much as the sea, built on what the terraces produce: the famous lemons, of course, but also vegetables, chestnuts, cheese from the high pastures, and wine from the steep vineyards. The trattorie here serve locals rather than tour groups, and the difference is written all over the plate. A long lunch at a family-run place in a hill village, with the coast glittering far below, is one of the great pleasures of the region.

This connection between a specific landscape and its food is the whole point, and it echoes the appeal of staying among the groves themselves; the region’s olive grove and orchard stays offer the same rooted, seasonal eating, where what grows outside the window is what appears on the table.

Where to stay, and when

The choice of base changes everything. Down on the crowded seafront you are in the thick of the beauty but also the crush; up in a hill village you trade the immediate sea view for peace, cooler air, and a genuine sense of place. For a slow trip, the upper village wins. Many of the most memorable stays are perched high above the water, and the drama of that position is the same one that makes the region’s cliffside and clifftop hotels so extraordinary, the sea a vertical drop away and the light changing on it all day.

Timing matters as much as place. High summer is when the coast is at its most beautiful and its most impossible; the shoulder seasons of late spring and early autumn give you the same warmth, the same light, and a fraction of the crowds. Go then, stay high, walk the paths, and the Amalfi reveals the serenity that its reputation has almost buried.

The coast, reclaimed

The Amalfi hinterland is proof that even the most over-visited places keep their secrets for those willing to look past the obvious. Climb above the famous seafront, walk the old paths, eat in the hill villages, and you find a coast that is still, quietly, one of the loveliest places in Europe. That refusal to settle for the crowded, obvious version of a place is the sensibility the travel and stays pages are built on, and nowhere rewards it more richly than the quiet country above the Amalfi sea.