The Path of the Gods, and the coast it looks down on

The Strada Statale 163, the coast road that carries almost all of the traffic between Sorrento and Salerno, was not completed until the 1850s, cut into the cliff face at enormous expense and difficulty by engineers working for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Before that, the towns of the Amalfi coast, Positano, Amalfi, Ravello and the rest, were connected chiefly by sea and by a network of mule paths that climbed directly up and along the mountainside above them, because the terrain simply left no other option. Those paths are still there, still walkable, and for a long stretch above Positano they carry a name that undersells nothing: the Sentiero degli Dei, the Path of the Gods.

The path runs along a high terrace roughly six hundred metres above the sea, connecting the villages of Agerola down to Nocelle, just above Positano, through olive groves, past abandoned stone farmhouses and along stretches of exposed limestone where the drop to the water is close enough to concentrate the mind. It is not a difficult walk by mountain standards, but it is a serious one, with enough ascent and enough exposure that it rewards decent boots and a head for a view that does not let up.

Why the road below looks the way it does

Seen from above, the coast road's difficulty becomes obvious in a way it never quite is from inside a car. The SS163 does not so much follow the coastline as negotiate with it, doubling back on itself through more than a thousand bends along its length, squeezed onto whatever ledge of rock the cliff offered between the sea and the terraces of lemon groves above. Those lemon groves, trellised and netted against the wind on terraces held up by dry-stone walls, produce the large, thick-skinned Sfusato Amalfitano lemons that flavour limoncello across the region, grown on slopes too steep for almost anything else.

Positano itself, tumbling down its ravine to a small beach, has no flat ground to speak of: houses are built directly onto the slope, staircases substitute for several of the streets, and the town's whole layout only really makes sense once you have looked down on it from the path above and seen how little choice its builders actually had.

Ravello, above the road and above the fuss

Further along the coast, Ravello sits higher again than most of its neighbours, reached by a steep road up from Amalfi rather than along the coast itself, which has kept it a degree calmer than the towns directly on the water. Its two great villas, Cimbrone and Rufolo, both open to the public, were built to take advantage of exactly the same principle as the Sentiero degli Dei: that the view from height, out over the whole gulf, is worth the climb to get it. Villa Rufolo's gardens, laid out above a cliff with the sea framed between umbrella pines, were admired by Richard Wagner during a nineteenth-century visit and are said to have suggested the setting for part of his opera Parsifal, a small detail that Ravello, quietly proud of the connection, has never let anyone forget.

Amalfi itself, at sea level and the coast's namesake town, was once the seat of one of medieval Italy's earliest maritime republics, trading across the Mediterranean centuries before Venice and Genoa rose to prominence in the same business. Its cathedral, reached up a long flight of steps from the main square, still keeps a set of bronze doors cast in Constantinople in the eleventh century, evidence of trading links that stretched a long way beyond this narrow stretch of coast.

A walking-based holiday on this coast typically uses a single base, either up in the hills or down by the water, for several days of graded walks that include a stretch of the Path of the Gods along with visits to Amalfi, Ravello and Positano, letting someone else deal with the coast road's thousand bends while you take the older, higher route on foot.

Spring and early autumn are the sensible months: the path has very little shade, and a summer crossing at midday is an entirely different, considerably harder proposition than the same walk in April or October.