20-05-2025
Shh… this is the quieter, more affordable end of the Amalfi Coast
Blink and you'll miss it. That's the best way to describe baggage reclaim at Salerno airport — and missing it is exactly what Sam Langley and her fiancé, Shaun McDonald, did a couple of weeks ago, after their flight from Gatwick. 'We walked right through it and out into the arrivals hall before we'd realised what it was,' Sam says.
'We had to get an escort back through customs to pick up our suitcases,' adds Sam, a former travel agent. Unsurprisingly, she was mortified.
But you can't blame them for the mistake. Salerno Costa d'Amalfi airport is tiny. For much of its life it was a military airbase but it reopened in July 2024 with a new runway, and a renewed sense of purpose. EasyJet is already flying there from Gatwick. Ryanair has flights from Stansted and from May 22 British Airways will have its own Gatwick service. You can't help but wonder what its startled Gold Club members will make of queueing outdoors for passport control.
Sam and Shaun, however, had no regrets about choosing the airport. 'Our return flights cost just £80 each, including checked-in baggage,' Sam told me. 'And look where they got us. The Amalfi coast! It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.'
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You can add me to Salerno's list of fans too. Because at a stroke, this unlikely rural gateway — ringed by polytunnels and chugging tractors — has made the quieter end of Italy's most fêted coastline more accessible. This is the shoreline east of famous towns such as Positano and Ravello, and reaching it from Naples airport, where most of the coast's five million annual visitors fly in, has always been a faff. Especially if you're driving along its white-knuckle coast road, where nearly every bend is blind and the local buses can't help but swing out into the oncoming traffic. The famous names are distracting too. John Steinbeck at La Sirenuse hotel. George and Amal Clooney at La Conca del Sogno restaurant. Gwyneth Paltrow in Ravello. Julia Roberts reportedly with her luxury villa near Positano. For decades, the coast's western resorts have been celebrity magnets. It's easy to be dazzled by their star quality and go no further.
But from Salerno the eastern shoreline is a cinch, provided that you use its boats. The airport coach to the city centre takes half an hour (£4.20; and from there it's a five-minute walk down to the Porto Turistico, where you can board Travelmar's serene and inexpensive foot-passenger ferries along the coast ( For a brief moment, you'll worry that the gritty container port on your right is a taste of what's to come. And then, suddenly, five minutes into your voyage, all you can see are the Lattari Mountains and the shimmering Tyrrhenian Sea. It's like diving into a swimming pool in the middle of a breathless summer day. You're pretty sure it's going to be good before you jump in, but you can't believe how delicious the reality is, once you're engulfed by its soothing, watery blues.
First stop, after the town of Vietri sul Mare, is the fishing village of Cetara, 15 minutes (and a £6.30 ticket) from Salerno. A quarter of an hour beyond that lies the small town of Maiori, with little Minori next door. At each of them, the mountains plunge down into the sea with the same giddy sense of gravity that you'll find further west. But here there are none of the crowds that choke those streets, nor the kind of luxury hotels where sea-view doubles can set you back £1,500 a night. It's as if someone had set up a checkpoint on the road to Minori and was only letting every tenth tourist through.
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My tour of this 'other' Amalfi coast started in Cetara, with a night at the Hotel Cetus — a bright white four-star that glitters with majolica floor tiles and clings to the side of a cliff below the wiggling coast road. With its private beach and a highly rated restaurant, it could easily cost £600 a night if it were in Positano. But here, later this month, double rooms can still be had for £234, including a long and delicious breakfast buffet that features blood-red strawberries and citrus-scented sfogliatelle pastries. Admittedly, the five-minute walk along the road back to the village is a little hairy (there are no pavements). But that didn't stop me wandering there for the evening to try its celebrated restaurant scene. La Dispensa di Armatore was my pick — a properly gastronomic little perch next to the sea wall that knows exactly what to do with anchovies: softening their earthy flavour with olive oil and just the right amount of lemon juice (mains from £15;
Then I put my head into the lion's mouth and went to Amalfi itself. The next stop by ferry from Minori, heading west, it's where the overcrowding begins. But I couldn't resist the allure of its dramatic location, wedged tight into a narrow valley beneath two towering cliffs. Besides, I'd found a place to stay that promised a degree of seclusion: at the far end of town, beyond its pizza restaurants and ceramics showrooms. Here, on a ledge that overlooks the valley road, Villa Lara is a crisp, neat B&B with big bedrooms and beguiling views. And yes, it was blissfully quiet. The only hubbub came from the valley's swallows, nesting on the cliffs opposite. This month, B&B double rooms cost from £180.
In the morning the manager Nello Rispoli told me to go higher still if I wanted to preserve this sense of tranquillity: 900 steps higher to be precise, to the village of Pontone, where he grew up. Until the 1970s there was no road up there, so he had to climb those steps every day after school in Amalfi. By the time he was a teenager he was doing it in 8-10 minutes. I made it up there in just under 20. Thank goodness Nello had WhatsApped his friend, Raffaele Mansi, at the Blu Bar to warn of my approach. His bar sits on a little piazza at the top of the steps and he was waiting to welcome me with a glass of sparkling water and freshly squeezed lemons ( As I sat there, watching the swallows dart through a medieval archway, it occurred to me that even here, close to one of the coast's principal sites of overtourism, you can still find a deep sense of quiet — if you're prepared to sweat for it. Profusely.
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So, on my final day, I went higher still. By now I'd caught another Travelmar ferry to my final destination of Maiori, which deters everyone but backpackers and holidaying Italians with its four-square seafront of postwar hotels and apartments. But I wasn't there for the architecture, or lack of it. I'd noticed the church that sits 2,713ft above its streets. The Santuario di Maria Santissima Avvocata was built in honour of a local hermit, and clearly the views from its terrace were going to be sensational. It was time for a proper walk.
I thought it would be easy. After all, the sanctuary is the scene of an annual pilgrimage on the first Monday after Pentecost (which falls either in May or June) — and not every pilgrim is a part-time mountaineer. But after a steady start up hundreds of steps, and an enchanting, flattish section through billowing banks of wildflowers, it suddenly turns steep, intricate and testing.
Did the first pilgrims pick such a demanding route to test their faith? Or was it to deepen the sense of rapture when they reached the top? Either way, my heart was bursting — right up to the point when I walked out onto the sanctuary's terrace and realised that a drone was buzzing overhead.
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It belonged to a small group of locals sitting at the foot of a statue. They were the first people I'd met since I'd left Maiori, two and a half hours earlier. Their guide, Enzo Masullo of Hiking the Sky, explained that they'd come to photograph the sanctuary in a bid to make this part of the Amalfi coast more popular.
'After all, it deserves to be better known — don't you think?' he asked.
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Sean Newsom was a guest of Hotel Cetus, which has B&B doubles from £200 ( Villa Lara, which has B&B doubles from £210 ( and easyJet, which has Gatwick-Salerno returns from £70 (
