August on the Amalfi Coast is, by the usual accounting, the busiest week of the year. The restaurants in Positano are full; the boats in the bay are close enough to each other to form a second road. For most travellers, this is the month to avoid.
We do not avoid it. We travel around it.
Our Amalfi Augusts happen at an altitude above the town. A single villa at Ravello, held for a week, with the cliffs below and the sea in the distance. A private driver, a private cook, and the hill road rather than the coast road. The Mediterranean the colour, in that month, of old silver in strong light.
The trick, in August, is to keep the mornings in the villa and the afternoons on the water in a private boat. We arrange a small wooden gozzo, a captain who knows the coast privately, and the sort of anchorage no guidebook will lead you to. A long lunch on deck, a cove entered on the turn of the tide, a swim out of sight of a single other boat.
The coast’s inland pleasures we save for the second week. A day in the hill towns of the Cilento, an evening at a restaurant in Sorrento’s old quarter that will hold a single table for us on a Tuesday. A drive, at some point, up to the temples at Paestum at a late hour when the guide closes the gate behind you.
We recommend August on the Amalfi Coast for travellers who understand that the way to travel through a crowded place is to travel above it. A private villa, a private boat, a private pace. The coast, approached quietly, is still the coast that Lawrence and Gore Vidal and the old families of Naples have loved for a hundred years. It has simply learned, in the interval, how to hide in plain sight.
