Whatever you do, don’t try to drive the Amalfi coast road.
It isn’t just that the road is a narrow strip of hairpin curves and harrowing switchbacks chiseled out of vertiginous cliffs. It would be a tight fit for vintage Fiat 500s, and yet somehow, in their endless contest for space, buses and passenger vans slip past one another with centimeters to spare.
The road doesn’t get any wider when it wends through seaside towns such as Positano. If you’re on foot, perhaps fighting through the crush of fellow tourists, just be sure not to step off the sidewalks and into all that traffic. Or at least that would be the advice I would give if there were any sidewalks on which to take sanctuary. Pedestrians can’t help but get into the mix and try to make themselves as skinny as possible as cars and trucks squeeze by.
And then there are the most unnerving of the road’s hazards — scooters. As the buses, minivans, sports cars, and SUVs play an endless game of chicken, the slenderest of spaces open between them for a second or two here and there. But the Amalfi coast road abhors a vacuum, no matter how fleeting that vacuum may be. Any gap that opens between contesting caravans is immediately filled with scooters. Riders weave through traffic, gunning their Vespas to plunge into gaps and then stand on the brakes to avoid plunging over the edge.
If you want to see what going over the side might look like, consult John Huston’s 1953 film Beat the Devil, a movie notable not only for the Amalfi Coast vistas, but for Humphrey Bogart’s costume. (He wears an ascot and deafeningly loud silk lounging robe.) Trying to get a bulky old limousine running with a push-start, Bogie and crew lose their grip on the car as it accelerates down a steep stretch of the Amalfi Coast road. At last, the road curves. Grazing the grill of a bus, the car careens through a stone retaining wall and, well clear of the cliff below, falls and falls and falls until finally belly-flopping in the water far below.
When Beat the Devil was made in 1953, the town of Ravello, perched high above the Tyrrhenian Sea, was an exotic location at which to shoot. Today, it remains achingly beautiful and is something of a respite from the madding crowds that have made the seaside along the Amalfi Coast claustrophobic.
One of the things that have gotten crowded in the coast towns is the spritz menu. The cafes along the beaches serve up plenty of Aperol spritzes, that drink of bitter-orange Aperol liqueur, sweet fizzy prosecco, and soda water that conquered Italy not so long ago and in the last few years has become a staple in the States as well. But the cafes have also concocted variations on the spritz theme, such as the Positano spritz, which replaces Aperol with local limoncello, and the Amalfi spritz, which adds pineapple juice and fresh lime to the original Aperol-prosecco mix.
As tasty as the spritzes may be, after a day or two, they start to be cloyingly sweet. One might think to simplify and just pour some prosecco. But as the sweetness of the drink comes primarily from the prosecco, that would hardly suffice. Is there, perhaps, a prosecco that doesn’t make one’s fillings hurt? I posed that question recently to the excellent bartender at Le Agavi, a hotel perched on a cliffside so steep that the resort has its own funicular. The barman recommended that if my friends and I were interested in some fizzy wine, we would be far better served with a bottle of one of the Italian wines made in the style of Champagne.
He wasn’t wrong. Soon, we had our glasses filled with a Franciacorta wine — in this case, a deliciously dry, toasty sparkler from the Uberti winery in Erbusco, in the north of Italy. It is a tremendous value. And you’ll need what savings you can get on the Amalfi Coast. After all, you’ll have to hire a driver, come the end of your visit, to transport you safely along the Amalfi Coast road.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
