The secret of the Amalfi Coast, which nobody will tell you because the people who know it would rather you didn’t go, is that the right month to visit is November. Not October, when the last cruise ships are still emptying their cargo of beige-clad pensioners onto the Positano steps. November. The month when the lemon groves are heavy and the town puts away the beach chairs and the cats have the alleys to themselves again.
I arrived in Praiano on a Thursday in early November to a rain so soft it was almost a mist. The bougainvillea was still flowering. The ferry from Salerno was half-empty. A woman in the cafe near the stairs to the marina looked up as I walked in and said, in English, “Ah, you came.” She was talking to me as if I had been expected for a long time, which, in a way that is difficult to explain, I had been.
Summer Amalfi is a postcard. November Amalfi is a conversation. The coastline, stripped of its crowds, reveals what it has always been: a series of small, proud villages clinging to a rock, getting on with their lives.
The thing about the off-season here is that you can actually walk. The Sentiero degli Dei—the Path of the Gods—which is a sweaty conveyor belt in July, becomes in November a quiet switchback through wet rosemary and cloud. I did the full traverse in a morning, met four other hikers, all Italian, all older than me, all nodding a “buongiorno” that contained an entire sentence of “yes, we know, isn’t it wonderful to have it to ourselves.”
Ravello, which feels staged in summer, becomes something else in the off-season: a real town, with a butcher and a baker and an old man who plays cards on a plastic chair outside the pharmacy. The gardens at Villa Cimbrone were almost empty. I sat on the Terrace of Infinity for forty minutes and watched the light move across the Gulf of Salerno. A single bell sounded from somewhere below. Then, after a long pause, another bell answered.
The restaurants that stay open in November are the ones that feed the locals. The menus are shorter. The pasta is better. I ate a plate of spaghetti alle vongole in Atrani, at a table for four set up in an alley barely wider than the table itself, while the family who ran the place ate their own lunch at the table next to mine. The wine was a glass of something local. The bill, at the end, was not a bill. It was a handwritten note that said, in Italian, “thank you for coming out of season.”
I am told the coast is very beautiful in June. I will take their word for it.