Amalfi Sun & Ruins

Campania in one arc: Naples first, loud and close, then a slow slide down the coast to lemon terraces and blue water. This is a week that starts in a working city and ends with your feet up on a seafront, and it suits travelers who want the ruins and the romance in the same trip without pretending one cancels the other. The character here is contrast, held deliberately. Naples gives you the grit — laundry-strung alleys, a scooter at your elbow, pizza folded in half and eaten on the move. Pompeii gives you the hush of a city stopped mid-sentence, ruts worn into stone streets, frescoes still holding their color. And then the coast opens up and the register changes entirely: cliffs, switchbacks, the sea doing its work below. The evidence is in the details. In the historic center, the fried street food comes hot from a paper cone, and the espresso is downed standing at the bar. There's a boat across the bay to Capri, and the famous drive between Positano and Amalfi, best taken with someone else at the wheel. Up in Ravello, the villa gardens hang over the water like balconies built for the view alone, and dinner is seafood and cold limoncello on a terrace as the light goes gold. Come in late spring or early fall, when the coast road is open and the crowds haven't fully landed. The pace is balanced — enough moving to see it, enough stillness to feel it — and the sunsets are worth staying up for.