Places to see in Amalfi Coast

The oldest surviving Roman amphitheatre, at the far end of the Pompeii site from the main entrance — which is why most visitors turn back before reaching it and why it is often nearly empty. Pompeii itself needs three hours minimum, good shoes and water; the site is large, hard and unshaded.

A garden at the edge of Ravello ending in the Terrace of Infinity — a balustrade lined with marble busts, four hundred metres straight above the sea and nothing in front of it. The single best view on this coast. Ticketed, and worth arriving for opening before the coaches reach Ravello.

The other Ravello garden, on the main square, with a Moorish cloister and terraces that stage the summer music festival on a platform hanging over the drop. Smaller than Cimbrone and easier to fit in. Wagner wrote that he found Klingsor's garden here.

Reached up a wide flight of sixty-odd steps from the square, with a striped Arab-Norman front that says plainly which sea Amalfi traded on. The Cloister of Paradise beside it is the part worth the ticket. Half an hour, and the centre of the only town on this coast with a flat piazza.

A plain white front on Ravello's square hiding two carved mosaic pulpits, one supported on lions, that are among the finest twelfth-century work in the south. Free to enter the nave, small charge for the museum in the crypt. Ten minutes, between the two gardens.