AFTER THE GODS

The soul stories and sublime horizons of the cascading Amalfi Coast continue to intoxicate.

- Stanley Stewart

AIl countries have narratives: a back catalogue of plot. On the Amalfi Coast, there are the Greeks, with temples full of lithe sculptures; the Arabs and their coloured tilework; the pink-faced Normans, nervously building watchtowers in case the Saracens turned up; the medieval fleets of Amalfi, commanding the Mediterranean and sailing home with cargoes of silver and lemon tree saplings. There is Odysseus, ghosting past the sirens, and there are the celebrities coming south from Rome in the 1950s and 1960s: people such as Franco Zeffirelli, John Steinbeck, and Jackie Kennedy, astonished by the sheer gorgeousness of the area; the sense that the Amalfi Coast was its own country with its own stories, a place blissfully separate from anywhere or any life they knew.

A narrow acrobatic road hugs the cliffs, catching out people unaccustomed to driving within a couple of centimetres of someone else's wing mirror. This road weaves those narratives together, each bend revealing another panorama, another sharp intake of breath, another story. Amalfi's renowned beauty can seem unreal: a barely credible conjunction of sea, sky, and mountains. Beneath the cliffs, the land swoons down through a tumult of rock, blossom, pine trees, and villas to a shore indented with bays. The sea is awash with sun, always the most extraordinary blue. It floods the horizons, its surface patterned with winds and cloud shadows, the wakes of pleasure boats unravelling like vapour trails. There is no coast in the world as beautiful.