From the deck of a boat the Amalfi Coast turns the right way round. Thirteen towns are stacked up fifty kilometres of rock in southern Italy, and from offshore they climb sheer off the waterline rather than hanging over a road. Positano is mostly stairs: streets of steps running down between houses painted pink, ochre and white, bougainvillea over the walls. Above the roofs sits the majolica dome of Santa Maria Assunta, green, yellow and blue, and it is what you pick out from far out at sea. Boats slip into caves like the Emerald Grotto and put in at coves no road reaches. Long flights of steps drop from the clifftop road to the pebble ones, where you swim in the shade of the wall above. The smallest empty the moment the day boats leave. High over all of it an old mule track, the Sentiero degli Dei, runs from Bomerano to Nocelle, with Positano's roofs and Capri far below.
Things have always passed through this coast rather than stayed on it. Amalfi was a sea power, and its navigators are credited with turning a floating needle into a dependable compass in the early 1200s and carrying it around the Mediterranean. The statue you pass on the seafront honours its inventor, Flavio Gioia, who almost certainly never existed: the name comes from a misread medieval line saying only that the compass had been perfected by the Amalfitans. Something came the other way in 1206, when a cardinal brought the bones of Saint Andrew back from Constantinople to the cathedral you climb to from the square. Twice a year priests still gather a clear liquid from the tomb, held here to be miraculous. Ravello sits highest of all, where you walk out on gardens that run to the very edge and the Terrace of Infinity sets marble busts above the drop. Wagner came up here in 1880 and carried something off as well. For years he had failed to imagine the enchanted garden of Parsifal's second act, and standing on those terraces he wrote that he had found it.