Historic Amalfi

A travel guide to the Amalfi Coast town of Amalfi

The whitewashed streets of the once-great maritime port of Amalfi are full of history, recalling a time in the Middle Ages when it rivaled Genoa, Pisa, and Venice as a trading behemoth.

Amalfi's connections with the Orient led it to introduce to Europe such novelties as paper, coffee, carpet, and the compass—though Amalfi holds they themselves invented that last one, and have even erected a statue in the middle of the piazza at the port of hometown boy Flavio Gioia said to have fabricated the first compass. Amalfi also entered history when a local monk, backed by Amalfitani merchants, founded a hospital in Jerusalem along with a benevolent order that later became known as the Knights of Malta.

At its height, Amalfi had a population of 70,000 and lorded it over the Tyrrhenian Sea. But the Normans gave it a whooping in 1131, and soon after Pisa swept in to trounce its rival twice. The final blow came in 1343, when a one-two combination of tidal waves and earthquakes slumped much of the grand city into the sea.

Amalfi is now a much reduced little resort town of 6,000 inhabitants, but left over from its glory days are a spectacular Duomo and the Tavole Amalfitane, the western world's first maritime code, a set of laws that continued to rule trade and the sea until 1570.

After you've ogled the Duomo while sipping cappuccino from a strategic cafe in the piazza, wander up the main drag Via Lorenzo di Amalfi into the Valle dei Mulini to watch the last paper-maker at work in his shop, and on your way back down detour off the main road to explore the marvelous maze of whitewashed tunnels and alleyways that make up the North African–style casbah of Amalfi's back streets.

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