Amalfi

Amalfi grew rich on trade. Its merchants carried grain from neighbouring lands, salt from Sardinia, slaves from the interior and timber, exchanging them for gold dinars minted in Egypt and Syria that bought Byzantine silks for resale in the West. In the 9th century they were already buying land with gold coins while most of Italy bartered. The town broke from Byzantine vassalage in 839, elected its first duke in 958 and rivalled Pisa and Genoa before Venice rose; around the year 1000, under Duke Manso, the state may have had 70,000 to 80,000 people. Its maritime code, the Tavole amalfitane, was used by Christian ports across the Mediterranean.

The Normans took the republic in 1073, Roger II of Sicily subdued it in 1131, and the Pisans took it in 1135 and 1137; a copy of Justinian's Pandects found there was claimed as booty. In 1206 Cardinal Pietro Capuano brought the relics of Saint Andrew from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade. A tsunami in 1343 destroyed the port and the lower town, and Amalfi never again had more than local importance.

The town also kept schools of law and mathematics, and one of Europe's first paper industries, learned from the Arabs. Visitors arrived early: two former monasteries became hotels in the 19th century, Richard Wagner and Henrik Ibsen completed works here, and in the Edwardian era members of the British upper class wintered in the town. The coast was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.

The memory of the republic shapes local identity. Every year the four old maritime republics — Amalfi, Genoa, Pisa and Venice — meet for the Historical Regatta, a rowing race first held in 1955 that comes to Amalfi once every four years, and the arsenal keeps one of the boats. On 31 August the town marks Byzantine New Year, the start of the year in the old civil calendar of Constantinople, and tradition holds that Flavio Gioia, credited with bringing the mariner's compass to Europe, came from Amalfi.

The religious year centres on Saint Andrew, the patron saint, whose feast days fall on 25–27 June and 30 November. A liquid said to seep from the tomb in the crypt, called manna, is collected twice a year at celebrations. The outlying villages keep their own patron saints' feasts.

Craft traditions survive. Amalfi still makes bambagina, a thick handmade paper used across Italy for wedding invitations, visiting cards and fine stationery, and exported to Europe and America; two mills remain. Lemons are everywhere, grown on terraces along the whole coast and turned into limoncello.

About 4,600 people live in the municipality, in the old town at the mouth of the valley and in the villages of Pogerola, Vettica, Pastena, Lone and Tovere on the slopes above. Space is tight: houses climb the cliffs, streets are stairways and alleys, and the one coast road carries all the traffic.

Tourism dominates the economy, with hotels, restaurants, shops and boat services along the seafront and the main street. Most of the farmland is given over to the Costa d'Amalfi lemon, which has protected status; the large, thick-skinned lemons called sfusato amalfitano grow on terraced gardens, where fruit can be seen from February to October. Paper-making continues on a small scale.

Life follows the season. In July and August the beach is full of Italian families on holiday, buses and boats are crowded, and the town is busy late into the evening. When the ferries stop in late autumn, the pace slows and the town returns to its residents. The local football club, Costa d'Amalfi, won its first promotion to Serie D in 2024.

Lemons are the flavour of Amalfi. The sfusato amalfitano is long and at least twice the size of other lemons, with a thick, wrinkled skin and sweet, juicy flesh with few pips. Its zest goes into limoncello, the lemon liqueur of the Gulf of Naples and the Gulf of Salerno, served chilled after dinner and sold in shops all over town.

The town's own pasta is scialatielli, a short, thick, slightly curved strip made from a dough with milk and eggs and flavoured with parmesan, with parsley added for seafood or courgettes and basil for aubergine. It is one of the most recently invented pasta shapes: the chef Enrico Cosentino devised it in Amalfi in the late 1960s, and it is now typical of modern Campanian cooking.

Along the coast, the fishing village of Cetara makes colatura di alici, a clear amber fish sauce produced by fermenting salted anchovies in small chestnut barrels. The sfogliatella, the shell-shaped Campanian pastry, descends from a version created in the 17th century in a convent at Conca dei Marini, just west of Amalfi.