Positano, before the first ferry

The Amalfi drive is forty kilometres of carved stone and hairpin bends, cut into the cliffs under the Bourbons in the nineteenth century and now carrying traffic it was never built for. In summer it moves at walking pace. The towns it links, Positano, Praiano, Amalfi, were founded by people who arrived by sea, and the coast still turns its best face to the water. From the deck of a yacht the famous road becomes what it always should have been, scenery.

A short coast, taken slowly

This is not a passage-making destination. The whole coast runs barely twenty-five nautical miles from Punta Campanella to Salerno, and the islands of the Bay of Naples, Capri, Ischia and Procida, sit within an easy morning of it. The pleasure is in moving little and moving well. Anchor off Positano and tender in for the evening walk. Slip around to Nerano for lunch. Pass Li Galli, the three islets owned in turn by the dancers Leonide Massine and Rudolf Nureyev, and take Capri whenever the mood suits. A week fills itself without effort. June and September here are worth fighting for, so raise your dates early when you plan a charter.

The anchorages

Positano's anchorage puts the whole vertical town in front of you like a stage set, and the evening light on its stacked houses is the best free theatre in Italy. Marina del Cantone at Nerano is the calmest overnight water on the peninsula and has the restaurants to justify staying. Conca dei Marini hides the Grotta dello Smeraldo, a sea cave where the light comes up through the water green. The Fiordo di Furore is a slot in the cliffs with a fishing hamlet at its foot, too narrow to enter but worth idling past. At Capri, swim off the Faraglioni before breakfast, take Marina Piccola under the cliffs of Monte Solaro, and see the Blue Grotto before nine, because after nine it belongs to the queue.

The towns were built by people who came by sea. A thousand years later, arriving by sea is still the only way they make sense.

The table

Spaghetti alla Nerano, courgettes and provolone melted into silk, was invented in the 1950s at Marina del Cantone, and Lo Scoglio serves it on a terrace standing over the water it came from. Da Adolfo at Positano runs its own shuttle from the beach, a small yacht with a red fish on the mast, out to Laurito for grilled mozzarella on lemon leaves. Cetara, the last town before Salerno, still makes colatura di alici, an amber anchovy essence descended from Roman garum. And everywhere there are the lemons, the enormous sfusato of Amalfi, in delizia al limone, in granita, in the limoncello that ends every meal whether you ordered it or not.

Worth leaving the yacht for

Ravello sits some three hundred and fifty metres above the sea and repays the climb. Wagner walked into the garden of Villa Rufolo in 1880 and declared he had found Klingsor's magic garden, and the Ravello Festival now stages concerts on a platform cantilevered over the drop. Villa Cimbrone's Terrace of Infinity is the single best view on the coast. In Amalfi itself the Duomo di Sant'Andrea rises above the piazza as a reminder that this small town was once a maritime republic trading on equal terms with Venice, Genoa and Pisa. An hour south of Salerno, the Greek temples of Paestum stand in open fields, the oldest of them older than the Parthenon, and on a weekday morning you will share them with almost no one.

When to come

The season runs from late April to October. May and June give you warm days, open restaurants and space at anchor. July is busy, and August is Ferragosto, when Italy takes its own holiday and the coast is at capacity ashore, though afloat you will hardly feel it. September may be the perfect month, the sea at its warmest and the light turning gold, and early October still swims. Whenever you come, keep the road for emergencies.