Positano

People first came here in the Upper Palaeolithic, when hunters and gatherers used the small Grotta La Porta and lived mostly by gathering shellfish. In the 1st century BC wealthy Romans began building villas along the Sorrentine Peninsula, and one stood in the bay of Positano, with another on the island of Gallo Lungo. The villa in the bay was buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79; excavated systematically since 2003 beneath the church of Santa Maria Assunta, it opened as a museum in 2018.

Legend says the town took its name from a Byzantine icon of a black Madonna: pirates carrying it past the coast were caught in a storm and heard a voice crying "Posa, posa!" — "put me down!" — and when they landed the icon at the village, then called Mortelle, the storm died away. In the Middle Ages Positano was a port of the Amalfi Republic, and from the 15th to the 17th century it prospered as a trading port. Watchtowers, some from the Angevin period, others from the time of the Spanish viceroys, still guard the shore.

By the mid-19th century the town had fallen on hard times, and more than half the population emigrated, mostly to America. Positano remained a poor fishing village into the 20th century, although Russian émigrés and artists found their way here. Tourism took off in the 1950s, above all after John Steinbeck's essay "Positano Bites Deep" appeared in Harper's Bazaar in May 1953. In 1997 the town became part of the Amalfi Coast UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Steinbeck wrote of Positano as a dream place that seemed unreal at the time and became real only in memory, and the town has drawn artists ever since. The director Franco Zeffirelli kept a villa here for 35 years, the pianist Wilhelm Kempff spent his summers teaching Beethoven's sonatas and concertos in courses that continue after his death, the singer-songwriter Shawn Phillips lived here from 1967, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote "Midnight Rambler" in its cafés. The dancer Léonide Massine lived on the Li Galli islands offshore.

The town has also starred on screen and in fiction. It appears in films such as Under the Tuscan Sun (2003), and the fictional Mongibello of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley is based on it. Positano has hosted the Cartoons on the Bay animation festival, which awards the Pulcinella prizes.

Local life still revolves around the church and the sea. The black Madonna of Santa Maria Assunta, said to have given the town its name, is its great object of devotion, and the chapel of San Pietro in the Laurito district holds a lively feast each year on 29 June. The town's football club, San Vito Positano, plays at the Stadio Vittorio de Sica. Fashion is a local trade too: clothing shops fill the lanes between the beach and the upper town.

About 3,600 people live in Positano. A quarter of the population is aged over 65, and about one resident in eleven was born abroad, most often in Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil or the Philippines. Besides the town itself, the municipality takes in the upper villages of Montepertuso, which has its own nursery and primary schools, and Nocelle, and the small district of Laurito.

Tourism is by far the main industry. In a few decades it turned a small fishing village into an international destination of hotels, restaurants and clothing shops, and it shapes the whole year: crowded from spring to autumn, much quieter in winter, when many businesses close. Lemons, oranges and olives still grow on the cliffside.

The landscape sets the rhythm of daily life. Built on the steep limestone slopes of the Lattari Mountains, the "vertical town" has little room to grow, and most streets are stairways. A single road winds through the town, served by a small local bus, while the Amalfi Drive passes above it; residents live with traffic queues, scarce parking and the constant climb between home, shops and sea.

The food of Positano is that of the Amalfi Coast: seafood, pasta and the produce of the terraces. Lemons grow to an extra-large size here and appear in everything from cakes to limoncello, the lemon liqueur made around the Gulf of Naples and along this coast, which is a favourite souvenir; the delizia al limone, a lemon-cream sponge cake, was created in nearby Sorrento.

The pasta most associated with the coast is scialatielli, a short, thick pasta with a rectangular cross-section and an irregular, slightly curved shape. Its dough is made with milk and eggs and flavoured with parmesan, with parsley added for seafood or courgette sauces and basil for aubergine. It is one of the most recently invented pastas: the chef Enrico Cosentino devised it in the late 1960s in his native Amalfi.

Fish and shellfish fill the menus of the beach restaurants, alongside pizza and pasta. The cliffside groves also give olives and oranges. Evenings often end with a chilled glass of limoncello.