A Week Driving the Amalfi Coast

People will tell you not to drive the Amalfi Coast. We understand why, and we still do it, because the alternative is being on someone else's schedule in a place where timing is everything.

The trick is hours. Between six and nine in the morning the road belongs to locals and to you. By eleven it belongs to buses. We plan every drive around that window, and the coast becomes a completely different experience.

We based ourselves in one town rather than moving every two nights, which is the single change that improves this trip the most. Unpack once. Take the boat when the road is busy. Come back to the same terrace every evening and watch the light do the same beautiful thing slightly differently.

The meals we remember were not the famous ones. A lemon terrace lunch above the water where the family who owns the grove brought out whatever they had picked. A late dinner in a town that emptied out at six when the day visitors left.

If you go, give it a full week and let us handle the sequence. The coast is small and the difference between a stressful trip here and a perfect one is entirely in the ordering of the days.