positano
View from above Marina Grande beach
Laura
Wearing my Cusco Caitlin duds
Italian linens on linens
Bougainvillea
Anchovies from Il Tari
A trip from Salerno to Positano via bus takes just under two hours. It’s funny, because as I type that I’m realizing it never felt like it took that long, even with the motion sickness. Using our 3-day travel passes, Laura and I caught the Sita bus to Amalfi from the center of Salerno Train Station, and from Amalfi immediately hopped on a different bus to Positano. It takes about an hour to get from Salerno to Amalfi and forty minutes from Amalfi to Positano. I will attribute my inability to feel the time passing to the gorgeous views and the lovely people we chatted with on the bus. The view is very similar to the drive on Highway 1 along Big Sur, the biggest differences are the more rocky content of the Amalfi hillside, the vertical drop from the road to sea level, the number of houses, and of course the many lemons you see growing atop those houses.
When we stepped off the bus in Positano we slurped down the first gelato and granita we could find and then set off to stroll around the colorful buildings and peek into the expensive shops. We climbed to several different viewpoints that looked South down onto the center of town, we were lucky enough to be there on a postcard-perfect day and the sweat we worked up was definitely worth it. We stopped in a hotel on the way down and asked for the easiest route to Fornillo Beach; I was very tempted by the various linen items hanging for sale against the staircases and Laura by the coral necklaces, but we made it through all the shops and bougainvillea without giving into temptation. If you haven’t already, you can read about our time at Fornillo and the other Amalfi beaches we visited in “Spiaggia, Spiaggia, Spiaggia.”
After the beach we scooped up some more gelato and headed back to the bus stop and as we waited I also grabbed a quick taste of Amalfi Limoncello. We stopped in Amalfi and had dinner at Il Tari to finally incorporate some seafood into our diet. Just a tip, the last bus that leaves Amalfi (at least in June) is at 9 PM so when you’re seven minutes late you might have to pay €100 to Taxi back to Salerno with a driver who’s frankly pretty aggravated that he has to drive to Salerno and back at the end of the day. But it’s not like that happened to us or anything.
