Ravello to Amalfi 🎼

We started our day today in the beautiful peaceful town of Ravello. Unlike the other popular towns on the Amalfi coast Ravello is high up on the mountain overlooking the sea. Quiet because they don’t allow large tour buses so on a Sunday morning it was very peaceful. We had made an appointment with a local guide to take us on a guided tour of the church on the main square - Saint John the Apostle of the Toro, and then the Villa Rufalo right next door. Her name was Philomena and she was great. We spent most of the time at the villa but the church was simple and had amazing mosaics.

The Villa Rufalo was built in the 14th century by a wealthy merchant. Then like many of the palaces and large villas went through challenging times. It had fallen into disrepair until the 1800’s when purchased by a man from Scotland. He restored the amazing villa and lived there for 40 years. What made it so famous is that the man from Scotland was a friend of the German composer Richard Wagner who came to visit and fell in love with the villa but even more with the amazing gardens. He was so inspired by the gardens he composed a famous opera there and I can’t for the life of me tell you which one. I’m not an opera fan but still very cool. Now Ravello is well known for the Ravello Music Festival which takes place at the villa every year for two months - July and August. And even more impressive is that they build a stage out over the terraces under the gardens so it hangs out over the sea. Top symphonies from around the world play there for it and if it sounds like you might be interested in seeing a performance you will need to already start thinking about planning for 2026. Only 300 seats for each show so tickets go fast.

The flowers in the garden were just planted a few days ago so not in full bloom yet - but still beautiful. Bottom left picture is where the stage is built over the roofs you see.

You see these Stone Pine trees all over the Amalfi Coast. They are often called Umbrella Pines and that’s exactly what they look like to me.

A sweet street in Ravello.

Time to start the hike. And sadly our streak of perfect weather has run out. It started to sprinkle a bit and continued lightly throughout most of the rest of the day. But we had rain jackets and it didn’t stop our plans. Plus we need to get down to the town of Amalfi and our feet are pretty much the only way. The views were still pretty but sadly the photos aren’t that great.

Lots of stairs going down for the most part but we did detour to make a climb to a scenic spot. This is the town of Atrani where scenes from the Netflix series Ripley were filmed.

Back to the stairs!

We stopped for lunch in a small village called Pontone. Was like something you might picture in the movie Under The Tuscan Sun, except that it was raining😂 We ate at a long table under a canopy with an old concrete wall with pots of geraniums attached to the wall. We ordered sandwiches or bruschetta and the sandwiches came in one size. BIG!

On to Amalfi! Still raining so a little extra caution on all the stone steps going down. We had been to Amalfi briefly a previous day knowing we would have some free time there today so had scoped out where we wanted to spend our time. First stop was the beautiful church of St Andrew. Quite a complex with a cloister, museum, crypt and then the cathedral. Baroque and Romanesque style. So much to take in but really beautiful. This picture was taken on our previous visit when the sky was so blue!

Then a bit of shopping. Amalfi is known for still hand making paper and there are a couple of stores that sell beautiful journals, notebooks, prints etc. Keeley was interested in getting a journal so she found one she liked at this shop and the man who helped us actually makes the covers by hand and designs them.

He put her initial on it too😊

We got a big kick out of seeing all the clearly tourists who purchased rain ponchos and coats with the lemons! So tempting to bring a few home.

Back to Maiori on a boat - my new favorite way to commute. A lovely dinner of rigatoni bolognese but smelled too good for me to be patient enough to take a picture. In spite of the rain another great day🤗