Capri, Positano, Amalfi

Navigating the coast without the crowds — a working strategy for the most heavily visited weeks on the most heavily photographed coastline in Europe.

There is a moment, around eleven in the morning on a Tuesday in mid-July, when the Piazzetta in Capri reaches its annual condition of structural impossibility. The funicular has just delivered another six hundred passengers from Marina Grande. The four cafés around the square are at capacity. The narrow shopping streets that radiate from the Piazzetta are moving at the speed of a slow tide. And the visitor who has come, with reasonable expectations, for a morning coffee at the Caffè Caso has begun to suspect that the morning will not, perhaps, deliver what was hoped for. The visit is not lost, but it requires the right strategy. This piece is about the strategy.

The Honest Position

We will not pretend, in this piece, that July on the Amalfi Coast or Capri is the month we recommend. It is not. The right months are May, late September, and the first ten days of October, and we have written, in this same series, about why. But the calendar of family life — school holidays, professional schedules, the rhythms of the rest of one's year — does not always permit those weeks, and a great many of our clients arrive asking for the coast in July precisely because that is when the family can travel together. The honest planner's response is not to refuse the request but to design carefully against the conditions.

What follows, then, is the working strategy we have developed over fifteen years of arranging summer-peak coastal weeks. It is not a magical solution. The crowds are real, the temperatures are real, the prices are real. What it offers is a way of moving through the coast that, more often than not, allows the visitor to find the version of it that is still worth finding.

The First Principle: Move Backwards in the Day

The single most useful adjustment, for a week on the Amalfi Coast in summer, is to invert the standard tourist day. The day-trippers from Naples and from the cruise ships at Salerno arrive between ten and eleven in the morning and depart between four and five in the afternoon. This is the window of greatest pressure on every public surface of the coast. The hours that the day-trippers do not occupy — six in the morning to ten, and five in the evening to midnight — are, in our experience, almost a different coastline.

We arrange, for our July clients, breakfast at the hotel at seven, the major sight-seeing of the day completed by ten, and the long, slow centre of the day spent at the hotel pool, on a boat at anchor, or in a private villa above the heat. The second movement of the day begins at five in the afternoon, with a swim, an aperitivo at a quieter terrace, and a late dinner that does not begin before nine. This rhythm — Italian rather than tourist — is the key adjustment. Followed for a week, it produces a coastal holiday that bears almost no resemblance to the one the day-tripper experiences on the same days.

The Second Principle: Be on the Water

The coast is congested on land. It is, in July, almost empty on the water. Half a kilometre offshore, the small bays between Positano and Praiano are essentially private. The grottoes, the swim platforms, the discreet beach clubs accessible only by boat, are all available at the same intensity in July as in May.

The difference between a coastal week that tests the patience and a coastal week that justifies itself is, very often, the number of days spent on a private boat.

We arrange, for clients in residence on the Amalfi Coast, at least three full days on a chartered gozzo or a small motor yacht over the course of a week. The boat departs from the hotel pier or from one of the marinas at eight or nine in the morning, before the day's traffic. It tracks along the coast at the discretion of the captain — Conca dei Marini for the Grotta dello Smeraldo before the public boats arrive, Furore for the swim in the small fjord, Spiaggia di Laurito for lunch at Da Adolfo, the small bay below Praiano for an afternoon swim. It returns at six in the evening with the clients sun-tired and ahead of the dinner crowd. These are the days that, in our experience, save the July week.

The Third Principle: Choose the Quieter Address

Positano in July is a town under sustained load. Le Sirenuse and Il San Pietro are wonderful institutions, and we send clients to both with confidence; but the staircase that descends from the upper village to the beach, in the heat of mid-July, is its own form of test. We will sometimes propose, for clients who have not been to the coast before, a base in a quieter address with day excursions to Positano rather than the reverse. Conca dei Marini at the Borgo Santandrea. Praiano at the Casa Angelina. Ravello, above the heat at four hundred metres elevation, at the Belmond Caruso or the Palazzo Avino. From any of these, a private car or a private boat reaches Positano in twenty to forty minutes, which is roughly the time required to walk between two parts of Positano itself in summer.

Capri, similarly, can be visited as a day trip rather than an overnight base. The crowd profile of the island shifts dramatically at five in the afternoon, when the day-boat passengers reembark for Naples and Sorrento; the visitor who arrives at three on a private boat and stays for dinner at Da Tonino or at Mammà encounters an island that, for three or four hours, returns to itself.

We arrange these afternoons regularly, and they are the way many of our July clients see Capri at its best.

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