Salerno

The Amalfi Coast is a masterclass in dramatic geography, where the Lattari Mountains plunge into the sapphire Tyrrhenian Sea in a cascade of vertiginous cliffs, pastel-colored villages, and terraced lemon groves. Driving the SS163 Amalfitana—a serpentine ribbon of asphalt clinging to the rock face—is an experience in itself, offering hairpin turns that reveal postcard-perfect vistas at every bend. The towns of Positano, Amalfi, and Ravello each offer a distinct flavor: Positano’s chic, cascading bougainvillea-draped houses; Amalfi’s historic maritime grandeur and striking Arab-Norman cathedral; and Ravello’s serene, elevated gardens at Villa Rufolo and Villa Cimbrone, which inspired Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’. This is a landscape that demands to be savored slowly, whether from a sun-drenched terrace with a glass of local limoncello or from the deck of a small boat bobbing in a hidden cove.

If Rufolo is poetry, Cimbrone is high theatre — a 11th-century estate reborn in the early 1900s by British aristocrat Lord Grimthorpe into an Edwardian fantasy of temples, grottoes, and statuary borrowed from antiquity. The approach along the Viale dell’Immenso, a cypress-lined avenue that seems to stretch toward infinity, sets the tone. The gardens unfold as a sequence of outdoor rooms: the Rose Terrace, the Temple of Bacchus, the Cloister of the Columns, each curated with the fastidious eye of a stage designer. But the crown is the Terrazza dell’Infinito, a marble balcony jutting over the void, guarded by a row of classical busts that gaze eternally toward the horizon. From here, the Amalfi Coast unspools in a single, breathtaking sweep — the white stack of Amalfi, the green terrace of Atrani, the blue wedge of the Mediterranean. It is, quite simply, one of the most photographed views in Italy, and yet no image captures the vertigo of standing there, the wind carrying the scent of lemon blossoms and the distant clang of a buoy.

Perched on a vertiginous spur above the Amalfi Coast, Villa Rufolo is the place where Klingsor’s magic garden bloomed in Wagner’s imagination — the composer wept here in 1880, declaring he had found the setting for Parsifal’s second act. The 13th-century Moorish cloister, with its interlaced arches and courtyard of ancient cypresses, opens onto the Terrazza delle Sirene, a belvedere that seems to float above the Mediterranean, framed by bougainvillea and the silhouette of the Torre della Guardia. Inside, the Torre Maggiore houses archaeological fragments and a small pinacoteca, but the soul of Rufolo lives outdoors: the lower gardens, restored in the 19th century by Scottish botanist Sir Francis Neville Reid, cascade in terraces of hydrangeas, agapanthus, and exotic palms, each turn revealing a new frame of the coastline from Amalfi to Minori. Summer evenings bring the Ravello Festival’s concerts to this stage, where music dissolves into the scent of jasmine and salt air.