Amalfi Coast

The road clings to the cliff face, hairpin after hairpin, and every bend reveals another village spilling down toward water so blue it looks lit from beneath. Lemon trees drip over stone walls, and the scent of Amalfi lemons — thick-skinned, impossibly fragrant — rides on the salt air. Below, a fishing boat crosses the cove trailing a wake that catches the sun.

The Amalfi Coast stretches 50 kilometres along the Sorrentine Peninsula in Campania, Italy, its cliffs dropping up to 500 metres into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Amalfi itself was once one of Italy's four Maritime Republics, its 9th-century naval code governing Mediterranean trade law for centuries. Ravello, set 350 metres above the sea, hosts classical concerts in the gardens of Villa Rufolo, where Wagner found the inspiration for Parsifal's magic garden. The terraced lemon groves produce the sfusato amalfitano, a lemon variety used to make limoncello that exists nowhere else. Positano's pastel cascade of houses became an international destination after John Steinbeck wrote about it in 1953.