Positano, Amalfi or Ravello? Choosing Your Amalfi Coast Town

The three towns in one table

What is Positano actually like?

A ravine with a town in it. Houses in ochre, pink and cream stack up both sides, the lanes are stairs, and everything ends at Spiaggia Grande with the majolica dome of Santa Maria Assunta above it. It is as good as the photographs, and it is also a serious walk: whatever you go down, you come back up.

Positano is the best base on the coast for boats, because they leave from the beach you are standing on. It is the worst for a car. If you have an hour and a half here, spend it walking down through the lanes and back along the shore path rather than trying to see anything specific.

What is Amalfi actually like?

The one town on this coast where you can walk about on the flat. The cathedral of Sant'Andrea dominates it from the top of a flight of steps — 11th century, twenty columns dividing the nave and two aisles, and the relics of Saint Andrew brought from Constantinople in 1206. The Chiostro del Paradiso is beside it, the paper museum is up the valley behind, and the medieval Arsenal is on the seafront.

It is also the coast's transport hub: the ferries call here, several boat tours board at the Darsena pier, and the road east and west both pass through. If you are only going to one town, this is the one that repays two hours best.

What is Ravello actually like?

Different from the other two, and the difference is the point. It sits 350 metres above the coast with about 2,500 inhabitants, and it is about gardens and views rather than beaches and boats. Villa Rufolo, built in 1270, has the garden Wagner saw in 1880 and took for Klingsor's in Parsifal; Villa Cimbrone has the Terrace of the Infinite. The Ravello Festival has run since 1953.

Both villas charge their own admission at the gate and neither is included in any coach tour here. Ravello is also the town people most often say they wish they had given longer.

Can you see all three in one day?

Yes, and it is the standard day out. The arithmetic works because the towns are close — forty minutes Positano to Amalfi, twenty-five more up to Ravello — and falls apart because the road is slow and parking is scarce. On a guided day the vehicle waits and you walk off it; driving yourself, you park three times.

The usual shape is an hour and a half in Positano, two hours in Amalfi and an hour or so in Ravello, with the road in between. The one-day guide sets out three versions of that and what each leaves out.

Which one should you drop if you only have half a day?

Ravello, on a first visit, because it costs fifty minutes of driving on top of the time you spend there. Keep Amalfi, because it is central, flat and has the most in it, and keep Positano only if seeing it is why you came. Half a day and three towns is a coach ride with three photo stops in it.

Which one has the best beach?

None of these three, strictly. Positano's Spiaggia Grande is the most famous and the most crowded; Amalfi's is workmanlike; Ravello has none at all, being a third of a kilometre above the sea. The best swimming on this coast is in the coves between the towns, which have no road to them — what you see from the water covers where they are.

Which one has the best food?

Amalfi for choice, Ravello for a view with the meal, Positano for the highest prices. Just east of all three, Cetara has the coast's one genuinely unique product: colatura di alici, which became Italy's first DOP fishery product in 2020. It is on the food and wine page along with the lemons and the DOC.

What about the towns nobody names?

Atrani is ten minutes' walk from Amalfi, covers 0.12 square kilometres and is the smallest comune in Italy; the coaches drive straight past it. Scala, above Amalfi on the other side of the valley from Ravello, is generally held to be the oldest settlement here and has the view of Ravello that Ravello cannot have. Both are on the towns page, and both are better than they sound.

How do you actually get between them?

Positano to Amalfi is about forty minutes by road and twenty-five by ferry in season, so if the boats are running that is the better half of the journey. Amalfi up to Ravello is twenty-five minutes on a valley road and there is no alternative: no ferry reaches it, and the walk is a serious climb rather than a stroll. That asymmetry is what makes Ravello the town people run out of time for.

On a guided day none of it is your problem, which is most of the argument for booking one. On your own it means either the SITA bus, which is cheap and slow and standing-room only in August, or a hire car, which means the parking and the alternate-plate rule. Getting to the coast covers the arrival; the moving around once you are here is on the visiting page.

So which one?

If you have one afternoon: Amalfi. If you have a day: all three, guided, in that order. If you have been before: Atrani, Scala and a boat. And if you are choosing where to stay rather than where to visit, that is a different question — the visiting page works through the five bases and what each one buys.