Tuesday 30 June 2026 4:45 am
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Monday 29 June 2026 4:57 pm
Italy holidays: a guide to Positano
Italy holidays: Positano is about to appear for its close-up. Here’s how to do it wellCoco Chanel needed only a suntan and a scandalous pair of beach pyjamas to turn the French Riviera from a winter health resort into Europe’s most coveted summer address. A generation later, Positano stole the crown. All it took was a warning from John Steinbeck: “The cliffs are all taken,” he wrote in 1953 – the town was too steep and secluded for the “honky tonk” to ever arrive.His verdict was published in Harper’s Bazaar, and the circus promptly packed their linen. The fishing village turned almost overnight into a lodestar for the global glitterati, drawing presidents’ wives and princesses who told all of their friends, proving no cliff is steep enough to deter a socialite. Seventy years on, it’s still a faff to get here, unless you arrive by yacht, as Positano has always implied one should.A drive from Naples snakes past Pompeii and Vesuvius onto the SS163, a cliff-edge road that corkscrews between rock and the Tyrrhenian Sea. A Vespa remains the entirely appropriate option to navigate the hairpin bends. Most visitors arrive by ferry or bus, released into the vertiginous streets stacked with peaches-and-cream buildings that cascade precariously towards the sea. The town is permanently inhabited by just 4,000 souls. Each summer that figure becomes increasingly difficult to process as day-trippers swarm, in pursuit of their own la dolce vita: an Aperol Spritz and inevitable “wish you were here” broadcast.Italy holidays: the glamour of PositanoYet, the irony at the heart of la dolce vita — the sweet life — is that it was never really about spectacle. It was about savouring the present: a long lunch, a slow passeggiata. That part can be tricky. The lanes brim with sorbet-stuffed lemons and lemony trinkets, and boutiques spill out lemon-print dresses onto stone walls. I watched a toddler wipe gelato fingers on a lemon-print kaftan that I discovered cost €500. In his defence, the artisan and the tat can be hard to tell apart. Four-fifths of Positanesi work in tourism and have embraced the folly with Mediterranean pragmatism and seasonal crowd-control measures.The success rate is debatable as you shuffle down pathways designed for goats. It’s fair to say that generational wealth has been squeezed from the humble citrus fruit, and from the town’s gift for monetising the legend it has so successfully exported. But the danger, when speaking about Positano, is sounding too pleased with one’s own cynicism. The crowds are real. The commerce is relentless. And yet the beauty is, genuinely, of cosmic proportions. No international hotel brand has managed to set up shop.Home-grown icons like Le Sirenuse and Villa Treville still set the classic, polished standard, selling the old-money mirage of striped awnings and white-jacketed waiters. But there is a cooler Italian fantasy now – you can feel it in London’s sudden glut of candlelit trattorias and the satirical bite of Real Housewives of Clapton, ribbing those who worship at the altar of the San Marzano tomato. Cinema captures the mood in its purest form: no longer Fellini’s paparazzi-lit La Dolce Vita, or Sophia Loren melodrama, but the sun-struck, sensual, undone world of Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, A Bigger Splash.) Nectarines from Nonna’s bowl. An espresso taken with wet, salty hair. Or the euphoria of swimming in dreamy briny blues with nobody else in sight.
