Amalfi Coast Luxury Itinerary: The Perfect 7-Day Guide

The lemon is the size of a small child’s head. You notice this at breakfast, when someone places a ceramic bowl of them on the table beside your espresso, and you realise that everything you thought you knew about lemons – the pale, anonymous ones rolling around in supermarket bags back home – has been a quiet and sustained lie. You are sitting on a terrace above the Tyrrhenian Sea. Below, a fishing boat is drawing a white line across the blue. The air smells of salt, citrus blossom and something baking somewhere. This is the Amalfi Coast at its most unapologetic: extravagant without trying, beautiful without performing, and entirely indifferent to the fact that you are slightly overwhelmed by all of it.

This Amalfi Coast luxury itinerary is built for those who want more than a postcard. Seven days is enough to move through this coastline properly – to understand the difference between Ravello’s contemplative heights and Positano’s sociable chaos, to eat well and sleep better, to find the cove that isn’t in the guidebook, and to do all of it without the particular misery of a badly timed reservation. For the full picture of the region before you arrive, our Amalfi Coast Travel Guide is the place to start.

Day 1: Arrival and Positano – First Impressions

Morning

Arrive into Naples and resist the temptation to rush. The drive south along the SS163 – the Nastro Azzurro, the Blue Ribbon – demands a clear head and a driver who knows it well. If you are hiring a private transfer, which you should, arrange to stop at a viewpoint above Positano before descending into the town. Stand there for five minutes. The houses stacked in vertical columns of terracotta and white, the church dome of Santa Maria Assunta tiled in majolica green and yellow catching the morning light, the whole thing tumbling toward a sea that is doing something theatrically blue – it’s the kind of view that makes you feel vaguely embarrassed by your own previous travel choices.

Afternoon

Check into your villa or hotel and do very little. This is not idleness; it’s strategy. Positano in the afternoon heat rewards those who are horizontal. If you are based on the hillside above the town, the views from a private pool terrace are worth more than any museum visit on this particular day. When the heat softens around four o’clock, wander down to the beach at Spiaggia Grande for a swim, rent a sunbed and watch the procession of humanity in expensive swimwear make its considered way along the shoreline.

Evening

For dinner on your first night, aim for somewhere that gives you the full Positano theatre: a terrace, the lights coming on across the hillside, the sea going dark below. The town has several excellent restaurants positioned precisely for this effect. Book ahead – the Amalfi Coast runs on reservations and the good tables go quickly. Order the locally caught fish, whatever the waiter recommends, and drink the house white from the Campania region. End the night with a limoncello. This is not optional.

Day 2: The Water – Boat Day on the Coast

Morning

Hire a private boat for the day. Not a group tour, not a shared transfer – a private wooden gozzo with a captain who has been navigating these waters since before you were thinking about visiting them. Depart early, before the day-trippers arrive by ferry from Salerno and the sea becomes considerably more crowded. The light at nine in the morning on the water here is something that painters have been failing to adequately capture for centuries, which is at least evidence that they kept trying.

Afternoon

Anchor in the Grotta dello Smeraldo near Conca dei Marini if the currents allow, or find one of the quieter coves between Positano and Praiano where the water goes from turquoise to deep green without apparent explanation. Swim. Eat whatever the captain’s wife has packed – and there will be something, because this is how it works on the Amalfi Coast – and spend the afternoon doing precisely what the coast was made for: horizontal contemplation of the Mediterranean. Return to your mooring in the late afternoon having seen the coastline from the angle it deserves, which is from the sea looking back at it.

Evening

Dinner in Praiano, Positano’s quieter neighbour, which has not yet decided to fully commit to the tourist economy and is better for it. The village is smaller, the restaurants are calmer, and the food is, if anything, more focused. Spaghetti alle vongole made with clams pulled from water you were swimming in earlier that day has a pleasing circularity to it.

Day 3: Ravello – Culture and Elevation

Morning

Ravello sits above the coastline at roughly 350 metres, connected to the sea below by a road that makes no concessions to the faint-hearted. Go by car and arrive early. The town’s famous gardens – Villa Rufolo and Villa Cimbrone – are both worth several hours of your time. Villa Cimbrone’s Terrazza dell’Infinito, the Terrace of Infinity, is one of those rare travel clichés that turns out to be entirely justified. It’s a long balustrade of marble busts looking out over the coast and the sea below, and on a clear day the view extends so far that the concept of horizon becomes somewhat theoretical. D.H. Lawrence came here. Gore Vidal lived nearby for decades. The Amalfi Coast has a long history of attracting people with good aesthetic judgement and the resources to act on it.

Afternoon

Lunch at one of Ravello’s restaurants in the main piazza, followed by a wander through the town’s unhurried streets. Ravello lacks the tourist density of Positano not because it is harder to reach – though it is – but because it has cultivated a certain reserve that doesn’t broadcast itself. The Duomo di Ravello, with its extraordinary 12th-century bronze doors and Romanesque pulpits, is genuinely worth your time. This is not something that can be said of every cathedral on every Italian itinerary, and it’s worth noting when it applies.

Evening

If the Ravello Festival is running during your visit – it runs through the summer months – attend a concert at Villa Rufolo. The stage is positioned above the gardens with the sea as a backdrop, and watching an orchestra perform Wagner in that context is the kind of thing that gives you an unfair advantage at dinner parties for years afterward. Book well in advance. Return to your base along the night-quiet corniche road with all the windows down.

Day 4: Amalfi Town – History Between the Crowds

Morning

Amalfi town – the one that gave the entire coast its name – is best approached before ten o’clock in the morning, when the day-trippers are still assembling themselves and the streets belong to the locals making their way to the market and the coffee bar. The Cathedral of Sant’Andrea is the centrepiece, its Arab-Norman facade rising at the top of a broad staircase with the casual confidence of something that has been watching empires come and go for a thousand years. The crypt below houses the relics of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of the town, and is worth the small entrance fee. The Museo della Carta – the Paper Museum – tells the story of Amalfi’s medieval paper-making industry, which is a more compelling narrative than it sounds. This coast had serious intellectual and commercial ambitions before it discovered the more profitable business of being beautiful.

Afternoon

Take a walk up the Valle dei Mulini, the Valley of the Mills, where the old paper mills still stand along a stream above the town. It is a genuinely unexpected piece of green quiet within a twenty-minute walk of one of the coast’s most visited points. Bring water and appropriate shoes. In the early afternoon, find your way to a less-frequented beach – the coast road between Amalfi and Maiori hides several small coves accessible by short footpaths – for a swim before the boats return from their day trips and the sea fills up again.

Evening

Back in Amalfi for dinner, eat at a restaurant far enough from the main piazza to be free of the ambient noise of group tourism. The local pasta is scialatielli – a thick, short ribbon pasta from Campania – served with seafood, and ordering it here, in the place where it is made with maximum seriousness, is the correct decision.

Day 5: The Hidden Hinterland – Footpaths and Hilltop Villages

Morning

Rent out a day from the sea entirely and go inland. The Lattari Mountains behind the coast are threaded with footpaths that most visitors never discover because they are focused on the coastline below them. The Path of the Gods – Il Sentiero degli Dei – runs from Agerola to Nocelle above Positano, and on a clear morning the walk takes around three hours and delivers views of the coast from above that reframe everything you have seen from below. Start at Agerola to walk with the light behind you and the sea ahead. Go early. Bring water, sunscreen, and better shoes than the ones you wore to dinner last night. The path is well-marked and not technically demanding, but it rewards the properly prepared.

Afternoon

Descend to Nocelle, a tiny village of steep lanes and extraordinary calm that sits just above Positano, and stop for lunch at the small restaurant there before taking the steps down through Montepertuso to Positano. There are about 1,700 steps, which is either a wonderful fact or a terrible one depending on your relationship with staircases. The descent takes around forty minutes and arrives at the upper edge of Positano, where you will feel, quite reasonably, that you have earned a long afternoon by the water.

Evening

A quieter evening tonight. Many villas on the Amalfi Coast come with outdoor kitchen terraces precisely for nights like this one, when the idea of getting back in the car or walking to a restaurant holds no appeal whatsoever. Arrange for local produce to be delivered – cheeses, cured meats, vegetables from the hillside gardens, local wine – and eat on your terrace with the coast spread out below. This is, by some margin, the best table on the Amalfi Coast.

Day 6: Capri Day Trip – An Island Worth the Effort

Morning

Take the high-speed ferry from Positano or Amalfi to Capri, and depart on the first service of the morning. Capri is not undiscovered – it has been fashionable since the Roman emperors used it as a personal retreat and has maintained that status with remarkable consistency for two thousand years – but if you arrive before the day-tripper ferries from Naples disgorge their passengers into the Piazzetta, you get a version of the island that resembles something close to the real thing. Take the funicular up from the main port to Capri town and have breakfast in the Piazzetta before the morning rush. Then walk. The path around the island’s coastline, past Villa Jovis where Tiberius ran the Roman Empire with spectacular moral flexibility, offers cliff-top views and relative solitude.

Afternoon

Take a small boat around to the Blue Grotto in the morning before the queues build, or skip it if you arrive after eleven and accept that the experience of queuing in a rubber dinghy for twenty minutes to spend thirty seconds in a cave, however blue, is not the most efficient use of your time in this part of the world. Instead, spend the afternoon in Anacapri, the quieter upper village, where the Villa San Michele – built by Swedish physician Axel Munthe in the early twentieth century – has gardens with views that justify the modest entrance fee several times over. Return to the mainland on the late afternoon ferry with the light going golden over the sea.

Evening

This is the evening for your best dinner of the trip. The Amalfi Coast and its surrounds have restaurants that take their sourcing, their wine lists and their kitchen craft with genuine seriousness. The tasting menus at the top establishments – typically six to eight courses, built around local fish, foraged herbs, and produce from the volcanic soil of Campania – are the kind of meals that take up permanent residence in the memory. Reserve a week or more in advance. Tell them it’s a special occasion, even if it isn’t. It saves everyone time.

Day 7: Slow Morning, Departure Afternoon

Morning

The last morning on the Amalfi Coast should not be rushed, and there should be a rule that prohibits people from scheduling early departures on their final day somewhere this good. Spend the morning exactly as you would have liked to spend every morning: coffee on the terrace, a slow breakfast, a swim if the spirit moves you, a walk along the coastline without any particular destination in mind. Buy lemons at the market – the enormous, rough-skinned sfusato Amalfitano variety that grow on the terraced groves above the coast and have a fragrance that bears no resemblance to the ones waiting for you at home. They travel well. They also make the customs queue mildly entertaining.

Afternoon

If your flight is in the evening, or you are staying another night in Naples, the drive back north along the coast road offers a different experience than the arrival journey: you know where you are now, you know the turns, and you can afford to look sideways at the view rather than concentrating quite so hard on what is coming around the corner. Stop at a bar in Vietri sul Mare – the ceramics town at the eastern end of the coast – for a final espresso and a look at the hand-painted tiles that the town has been producing since the sixteenth century. Then return to Naples, and to the world that has been waiting patiently for you to return to it.

Practical Tips for This Itinerary

The Amalfi Coast is best visited between late April and early June, or in September and October. July and August are warm and spectacular and also considerably more congested than anything you are likely to have previously experienced on a coastal road. The coast road itself – single-lane in many sections, shared with buses, scooters and the occasional tour group – requires patience and preferably a driver who has done it before. Private water taxis between towns are a worthwhile extravagance and will, on occasion, be the fastest option available.

Reservations matter here more than almost anywhere else in Italy. The best restaurants, the private boat charters, the guided walks and the concert tickets at Ravello should be arranged before you arrive. Your villa concierge, if you have engaged a good one, will handle most of this. If they cannot, find a different concierge.

Dress codes at smarter restaurants are semi-formal in the evenings. Flip-flops are acceptable everywhere during the day and at dinner in beach-adjacent establishments. The Amalfi Coast manages to be simultaneously relaxed and well-dressed, which is one of its more admirable qualities and one that requires a small amount of advance wardrobe planning.

Base Yourself in a Luxury Villa on the Amalfi Coast

A hotel, however well-positioned, gives you someone else’s itinerary. A private villa gives you your own. The difference on the Amalfi Coast is significant: a villa with a terrace above the sea, a private pool, a kitchen stocked with local produce and a position that lets you watch the light change over the water on your own schedule is not a luxury upgrade on the hotel experience – it’s an entirely different relationship with a place. You are not a guest passing through; you are, temporarily and very pleasantly, living here.

Excellence Luxury Villas offers a carefully curated collection of properties across the coast – from hillside retreats above Positano to quieter escapes near Praiano and beyond – each selected for the quality of its position, its interiors and the experience it delivers. Base yourself in a luxury villa in Amalfi Coast and give this itinerary the foundation it deserves.