The Amalfi Coast: What Nobody Tells You

All the notes from last night's Destination Deep Dive

The bad news: Zoom recorded the audio but not the video this month.

The good news: I turned the whole session into a full written guide that might be more useful than a replay anyway. You can actually reference it while you’re planning instead of scrubbing through a video looking for what I told you about that Airbnb in Scala you think is a good idea.

Photo from an apartment listing in Scala that boasts it is just one kilometer from the beach. It’s not… inaccurate, but it’s going to cost you at least €100 to get there and back. This, my friends, is why a good hotel costs what it costs.

This Destination Deep Dive gives you the honest truth about what the Amalfi Coast actually is (and isn’t), so you know exactly how to plan for it and how to avoid being disappointed. I included:

• Town-by-town breakdowns.

• What to eat

• What to skip

• Where to stay, how to get around.

• The tip about not swimming at the beach in Positano that will save you a diesel-scented afternoon. All of it.

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Your Amalfi Coast Deep Dive — The Full Notes

The Amalfi Coast is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It’s also been built entirely for tourism since the 1950s. There is no “authentic” fishing village that you can walk to from Positano, no off-the-beaten-path neighborhood where all the locals are sipping wine, no hack that makes it cheap or easy. (Actually, the hack is Cilento, where all of these things are very real and affordable.) The sooner you accept what it is, the more you’ll love it. The people who come back disappointed are the ones who thought they could wing it with Airbnbs, the train, and the bus.

Amalfi in the early 1950s, when hotels were new, and tourism was first being developed.

These two things, specifically, will save your trip...