Amalfi Coast · Italy
Amalfi Coast with family
Italy's vertical coastline of lemons, tiles and sea light.
Sleep where there is flat ground. That single decision does more for a family week on the Amalfi Coast than any amount of planning, because this coastline is a wall with villages fixed to it, and children need somewhere to be that is neither a staircase nor the edge of a road.
What is actually hard here
Very little of this place is level. In Positano the streets are flights of steps, so a pram becomes luggage rather than transport and every return from the beach is a climb at the end of a hot day. Roads here are narrow, busy and continuously turning, which is precisely the recipe for travel sickness in the back seat, and the buses working them are standing-room only through the season.
Beaches surprise people too. Most are dark pebble rather than pale sand, they shelve steeply into deep water within a few strides, and several of the best are reached either by boat or by a long stairway down from above. None of that makes the coast unsuitable for children. It does mean a family day has to be built around water and shade rather than around villages and viewpoints.
Where the flat ground is
| Town | What a family gets | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Maiori | The longest beach on the coast, and a level seafront to walk it | Less picturesque than its neighbours, which is rather the point |
| Minori | A small beach, a flat centre, a working town | Little to do beyond the beach itself |
| Atrani | A pocket square behind the sand, traffic-free and calm | Very small, with Amalfi's crowds next door |
| Amalfi | Seafront, bus interchange and ferry quay on one flat strip | Thronged from mid-morning until late afternoon |
| Ravello | A level pedestrian square high above the coast, and garden ground to run on | Getting up there, and no beach at all |
| Positano | The photographed one, with a beach at the bottom of it | Stairs in every direction, and nowhere flat to stop |
Build the days on the water
Boats undo most of what the road does. Children generally like them, nobody is car sick on one, and transport becomes the outing rather than the tax on it. The Luxury Amalfi Coast Boat Tour with Swim and Prosecco is the shared version, with swim stops along the way. Taking the Cayman Boat charter for exclusive use costs a good deal more and buys what families actually need, which is a schedule that bends — a nap, an early return, a longer stop at whichever cove worked.
A pool earns its keep here more than it does in most places, because it is the only swimming that involves no descent. Hotel Raito has a sea-view one at the calmer eastern end of the coast, above Vietri sul Mare.
Where to sleep
Hotel Zi'Ntonio, in hillside Scala, is the straightforward answer: family rooms, a garden, a terrace to eat on, and free parking, which almost nowhere along here provides. Its trade is that swimming means a drive or a bus down.
If walking to everything matters more than any of that, Vista d'Amalfi puts the quay, the seafront and the shops a few steps downhill in Amalfi itself. No pool and no garden, but no logistics either.
How long, and when
Shorter than you think, and not in August. Months at either edge of high summer give warm water without the crush or the heat that makes stairs miserable. What each month is like, and how many days this coast repays, have pages of their own.
More on Amalfi Coast
The desk
Planning Amalfi Coast?
Tell us where, roughly when, and how many. A person reads every enquiry and answers from the address you give. Nothing is passed to an operator without your say-so.