Amalfi Coast Itinerary: A First-Timer's Guide to Getting It Right

An Amalfi Coast itinerary has one puzzle to solve before any other: there is no tidy way in, and the towns you want sit along a cliff road and a patchwork of seasonal ferries rather than a rail line. Sorrento, Salerno, Amalfi and Positano each work as a base, and each solves a different problem. Choosing between them is the decision that shapes everything else.

This guide is built around that choice, and around the two things that quietly decide how much of the coast you actually see: how the ferries run, and how many steps sit between your hotel door and the water.

What Counts as the Amalfi Coast, and Why It Decides Your Base

Most itineraries treat Sorrento, Positano, Amalfi and Salerno as four towns on one coast. They are not, and the difference is the single most useful thing to understand before you book.

The Amalfi Coast proper is the southern side of the Sorrentine Peninsula, in the province of Salerno. UNESCO lists it as the Costiera Amalfitana, 11,231 hectares across fifteen municipalities, running broadly from Positano in the west to Vietri sul Mare in the east, with Praiano, Amalfi, Atrani, Ravello, Minori, Maiori, Cetara and the inland villages between them.

Sorrento is on the northern side of the same peninsula, facing the Bay of Naples, in the province of Naples. It is not on the Amalfi Coast — but it is one of the most practical bases for first-time visitors, because it connects easily to Naples, Pompeii and Capri. Salerno sits at the eastern end and works as the rail-and-ferry gateway rather than a resort-style coast base.

Between the two sides run the Lattari Mountains, which UNESCO describes as the natural border dividing the Gulf of Naples from the Gulf of Salerno. That ridge is why a short line on a map becomes a long transfer in practice: to get from Sorrento to Positano you go over the peninsula or around it by sea. Nothing goes through it.

Best Base by Trip Shape

There is no best base, only a best base for the shape of your trip. The question is not which town is loveliest. It is where most of your days will actually be.

Which brings up the trade-off nobody puts in a comparison table. Sorrento is not automatically the budget winner. It usually costs less than Positano and makes arrival, Naples and Pompeii dramatically easier — but if most of your days are east on the coast, you pay part of that saving back in travel time, twice a day, on days you were meant to be on holiday. On a three-day trip that can be most of the trip.

Getting There, and Getting Along the Coast

Every itinerary funnels through Naples or Salerno, because no high-speed line reaches the coast itself. From Naples, the Circumvesuviana regional railway runs to Sorrento via Pompeii in about an hour to an hour and twenty. From Salerno, the coastal ferries leave from the port. Frecciarossa services connect Rome to Naples in a little over an hour, and run to Salerno as well.

In season, Sorrento has direct ferries to Positano and Amalfi as well as Capri: NLG runs fast services from Sorrento's Marina Piccola to all three. The timetable is seasonal, with reduced or suspended sailings outside the main months, so it must be checked for your exact dates rather than assumed. Travelmar is the principal operator on the eastern stretch, linking Salerno, Amalfi, Positano, Minori and Maiori, and Salerno has the most departures of any port on the coast.

The coast looks compact on a map, but ferry frequency — not kilometres — usually decides how many towns fit into a day.

So build coastal days backwards. Find the return sailing you need, then the last one after it, then the road fallback if both go wrong. The Positano to Capri run, for instance, has only a handful of daily departures, which turns a casual island day into a fixed schedule. Two towns done properly beats three done at a run for a boat.

The road fallback matters because ferries are weather-dependent. Sailings are cancelled or suspended when the sea is up, and that happens outside winter too. The SITA bus along the SS163 is the year-round alternative, but it is slower and busier in summer, and incidents or peak congestion can add substantial delay. So keep some slack in a longer itinerary, and never build a tight train or flight connection on the far side of a final ferry — that is the one failure that costs money rather than an afternoon.

Stairs, Steps and Suitcases

This is the part of the Amalfi Coast that maps do not show, and it catches out more first-timers than any timetable.

These towns are built vertically. Roads sit above or below the places people actually stay, and the connection between the two is frequently a staircase. A listing that says "five minutes from the centre" can mean five minutes downhill and twenty back up. Walking directions will give you a distance and a time; they often will not tell you the step count, the gradient, whether a vehicle can reach the door, or whether the "port" end of that walk is the pier or the road above it.

If someone in your party has limited mobility, or you simply travel heavy, this should outrank scenery in the base decision. Salerno and Sorrento are reachable by train and largely flat where you will be staying. Positano is a staircase with a town on it.

Three, Five or Seven Days

Three days: focused highlights. Enough for the coast's headline towns if you keep the geography tight and resist the island. Day one is arrival and your base — the transfer chain from Rome or Naples will take most of it, and pretending otherwise is how people end up eating dinner at ten. Day two is Positano and Amalfi, linked by ferry. Day three is Ravello above Amalfi, or a slow morning on the water, then departure. Capri does not fit into this without cutting something real; if the island is the point of the trip, give it a dedicated day and drop a coastal town instead.

Five days: the comfortable first visit. The same coast without the compression, plus one big addition. From Sorrento, Pompeii is a direct train and an easy half-day to full day — far easier than from Amalfi or Positano, where you would be crossing the peninsula first. From a coast base, Capri is the more natural addition. Keep one base if you can: five nights is not long enough for moving to earn back the half-day it costs.

Seven days: room to slow down. Here the one-base rule stops being automatic. One base is still the simplest: nothing to repack, no dead half-day, and the tourist tax discount for longer stays works in your favour. Two bases can be a deliberate choice rather than a mistake — a practical gateway such as Sorrento or Salerno for Pompeii, Naples and Capri, then three or four nights in Amalfi or Positano for the coast itself. What is hard to justify for a first visit is three or more: each move costs a half-day and a luggage haul, and on this terrain that is a real price.

What It Costs Beyond the Room

Four cost layers sit on top of your hotel rate, and all four change your itinerary rather than just your budget.

Ferry fares are modest per crossing but add up across a week, and they rise between seasons — the operators publish a tariff sheet each year, and a fare quoted in an old guide is usually low. Check the current PDF for your dates rather than planning around a screenshot.

Tourist tax is municipal, not coast-wide, so Amalfi's rate is not Positano's or Sorrento's. In Amalfi the Comune charges roughly €3 to €5 per person per night by accommodation category, applied seasonally rather than year-round. The 2022 resolution sets €5 in five-star hotels, €4 in four-star and €3 in three-star and other accommodation, charged from 1 April to 2 November each year. Children under ten are exempt under the Comune's own regulation. That regulation also provides a 50% reduction after the fourth night for certain accommodation categories — but the current published text refers to categories that are no longer defined in Article 4, which only says the Giunta sets the amounts. So the reduction exists and we cannot tell you which bookings it applies to. Ask your accommodation to confirm how it applies to yours.

Capri's landing tax is charged on top of your ferry fare and is higher in summer than in winter. It is per person, per landing, and it is not usually included in the headline crossing price.

Parking, if you bring a car, is expensive and scarce, and in July and August it is genuinely difficult. Rates vary by lot and by season and are not reliably published in advance, so treat any figure you read as indicative and check the signage on the day. For most first-timers the better answer is not to bring a car at all: the SS163 is narrow, slow in summer, and the towns you are driving to have nowhere to put the vehicle.