On sunday, December 7, 1997 World Heritage Committee decided to register Amalfi Coast for the World Heritage List as an “extraordinary example of Mediterranean landscape, having astonishing panoramic and cultural values due to its dramatic layout and history.”That is why the Gulf of Salerno, bay that lays between the Lattari Mountains and the bathing see of Vietri sul Mare and Positano, got the status of “World Heritage”. All of a sudden local communities became guardians and caretakers, for present and future generations, of a land “created without that God had forget any detail” as Domenico Rea wrote.The landscape is typically vertical. With age-old mastery here man shaped work’s painstaking terracing and hidden streets within the bowels of villages hanged on mountaintop and raising from the see to the sky. Over those ridges, this litoralis man built his terracings, reddened by bunches, lemontrees-scented and rejoiced in vineyards. He carried on his shoulders ruin’stones to contain the wideness of the macéri, whose order was beloved inspiration to Mauritius Cornelius Escher’sgeometrical drawings. They are called “Lemon gardens” to celebrate nature’s triumph and the colors of handpainted pottery made in Vietri sul Mare by craftmen in their crowded shops.
“This is the garden we are always looking for in vain, after knowing the perfect places of childhood” said Salvatore Quasimodo in his “In Praise of Amalfi”.
Amalfi was the first of the Maritime Republics within the complex italian history, faceted into dozens of cultures, dialects and artworks. A city-state able to give to seafarers a compass to navigate and rules of navigation, the so called Tavola Amalfitana to crown well-estabilished set of common rules among medieval navies.“Gentle sails of Republic as visible and invisible “charts” of ancient and patient civilization still blow in the wind in the small harbour”went on writing Quasimodo. Naturally, then history interwined with the stories of all the people, local inhabitants and foreigners, who came in place called forth from knowledge or simply from summertime leisure; these are also the places where many people could find shelter fleeding away from the saddest european history, in the years of totalitarisms, and friendly “earthy painting” where many artists, writers, dancers, musicians and painters, actors and directors, christians and jewish, found their peace as enchanted people.
And it was in the endless spaces and nature’s harmony of Ravello that Richard Wagner, touched by the pine trees summit and by roses and the silence just broken from the tweeting of birds, also found magic Klingsor Garden to fill scenes of his Parsifal, mad and spotless knight searching for the Holy Grail. Driving down state road, bend after bend, means to be witness of a constant change: majolica domes and enlighted balconies which Stephen Andress remembered as “nest built with silence wires”take turns with luxuriant buganvillee and fullness of flowers into the white houses that stand out against green rocks. As a symbol of a defended past, Saracen towers oversee beaches and coves,gelous guardians for lovers landfall, stolen kisses, white seagulls nests. The victory of a landscape which is hung between light blue of skies and deep blue seas. Alfonso Gatto, poet, said “Here stay longer the unsaid, the happening of a town that once there was, to call by name and silence. It is kind of dream to say about these houses that they are real.”
Few tuna fishing left are still the pride of ancient italian navy. They quietly swing in Cetara’s harbour to leave in a row with the sunset, like nuns in the hallway of a cloister. In this “dream location that looks unreal till you are not there” said John Steimbeck “whose intense reality is possible to take and miss only once you left”, an old manor house can be a squeakly clean hotel, such as a bower of grape up to the outdoor tables, while the ocean in view reminds you of the Songs of the Sirens. Up to the hill there are chestnut groves and vineyards, and fresh milk to collect for gourmet products. The Secret Soul Garden, invented and managed by Telese – De Marco family, is hidden in Campinola, where the last of the Tramonti baskets makers lives. It shows 3 hundreds variety of roses mixed with smelly basil and refreshing mint, hortensia bushes, sterlizia tribes and wide flora species, being really an hymn to nature.
Alfonso Gatto wrote: “The road that goes from Vietri to Capodorso, Minori, Amalfi, ups and downs towards Conca and Furore Sea. It is a mountain road…” where “the scented calm of the afternoon sleep” that celebrate Love can be found. These are vertical places, where stairs and voices from all over the world blend, coasts where anyone lives ” just a day in the open air within his nothing.”