The Stairs of Positano

I went to Positano, on Italy’s stunning Amafi Coast, in 2003 to attend a wedding. This is one of my favorite photos from that trip.

It’s no easy feat getting to Positano. After arriving in Rome, I took a train two hours south to Naples, then transferred to the Circumvesuviana, the local train that runs between Naples and Sorrento. This took about forty-five minutes. In Sorrento, you can catch a public bus or hire a taxi to take you over the hill and along tiny, winding roads clinging to the edge of a cliff. A taxi will take approximately thirty minutes and a bus anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour, depending on how often it stops. By the time I actually arrived in Positano, I felt as though I’d come an extraordinarily long way.

Positano is a small community, overrun with foreign tourists in the summer, their Fiats and hired taxis jamming the one road in and out of town. In the spring and fall, it’s a little quieter, although still a very popular destination. The city is completely vertical, rising from the smooth stone beach to the top of the cliffs above. If you want to go somewhere, you have to climb. I’m pretty fit, but after a few days in Positano my knees were killing me and my calves begging for mercy. You can always spot the locals when in Positano. They’re the ones with the incredible quadriceps, bounding around you and up the stairs like it was a simple Sunday stroll. Even the little old ladies boast the legs of career athletes.

One of the fun things about exploring a city connected by stairways is that you’re always discovering some new nook or cranny. Each day, when I descended from my hotel to the beach, I would find a new set of stairs tucked away between buildings. Each passage seemed to eventually lead to the shore, but via a completely different route. Walking down unfamiliar stairwells, it was a delight to come upon a potted olive tree, a cat sleeping on a sunny windowsill or a mysterious red door leading someplace unknown. Each turn in the descent would reveal some new sight. One set of steps cuts behind the city’s large drainage pipe at the spot where it spills out into a small stream below, so you feel as though you’re walking behind a waterfall. Another expels you onto the front steps of a little church, allowing you to peek in and see services in progress. While Positano’s postcards invariably feature its gorgeous waterfront, its tile-domed cathedral and the views from its many balconies, my most enduring images of the city are of the stairs leading up, down and all around the town.