All my photos are of blue and green smears through a smudged window, so I appropriated this one from Google. Credit where it’s due:
I always thought of Italy as dry, like in the Spaghetti Westerns, but the Amalfi Coast is lush and heavy, almost tropical. The bus ride from Salerno to Amalfi along the Strada Statale Amalfitana might have just knocked the Columbia River Gorge off its pedestal as the most gorgeous drive I’ve ever taken, though poor Rachel spent much of it understandably wilting in her seat with carsickness. The six-mile drive takes an hour and a half.
If you Google “Strada Statale Amalfitana,” the first result you get is an article from dangerousroads.org. The second is an article titled “A Word of Caution Before You Drive the Amalfi Coast Road” on TripAdvisor.
The highway winds precariously across the faces of the hills hundreds of feet above the Tyrrhenian Sea, sometimes cut directly into the hillside and sometimes bolted to the tufa and supported by impossibly narrow concrete pilings. The cliffs are steep, the barricades are low, and every curve is blind. When the bus turns corners, it blocks the road from edge to edge. Drivers honk almost continuously to warn oncoming traffic that they’re coming.
But the Amalfi Coast well deserves its reputation as one of the most gorgeous drives in the world. From the tops of the steep hills, tufa and foliage tumble straight down into the deep blue Tyrrhenian Sea. In the purple twilight, lights twinkle like stars on the hillsides and the sea and sky fade to identical shades of gloaming-blue until the horizon disappears and the hillsides hang over an abyss. The lemons dangling from the branches are bright splashes in the headlights.