Sorrento, Positano, Ravello — choosing your coast

The Amalfi Coast is really three moods. Sorrento, on the headland facing Naples and Vesuvius, is the graceful base — flatter, easier underfoot, with the grand garden villas and the simplest access. Positano is the postcard: vertical, glamorous, impossibly photogenic, but a place of steps and crowds. Ravello, 365 metres up, is the romantic's choice — clifftop gardens, cooler air and the coast's most famous belvederes.

For a wedding that has to move guests comfortably between ceremony, dinner and beds, Sorrento is the practical answer, with the rest of the coast a boat or a drive away. Villa Astor sits here, its gardens running to the cliff edge above the bay.

A coastal weekend, sequenced

The coast rewards a four-day celebration built around the water. Arrive into Naples and drop down to Sorrento for a first night of limoncello and a sunset over the bay. Hold the ceremony in a clifftop garden at golden hour, the light doing all the work, and follow it with a long Italian dinner under the pines as the lights of Naples come on across the water.

Give the next day to a boat — the only civilised way to see this coast. Slip along to Positano for a swim and a beach-club lunch, round to a sea cave, and finish at Capri for an Aperol as the day-trippers leave. For the history-minded, Pompeii and Vesuvius are an easy morning inland.

“On the Amalfi Coast the setting does the work. You don't decorate a clifftop garden above the Bay of Naples — you simply get out of its way.”

— From our Campania concierge desk

The boat is the point

If there is one rule for an Amalfi wedding, it is to put guests on the water. The coast road is beautiful and slow and prone to summer gridlock; the sea is fast, cool and spectacular, and arriving at a wedding or a lunch by boat is the coast's signature pleasure. A private charter for the wedding party, and a shuttle of larger boats for guests, turns the logistics from a headache into the highlight.

It also unlocks the coast's best moments — a swim off the back of the boat below Positano, lunch at a sea-level trattoria reached only by water, the Faraglioni rocks of Capri at golden hour. Build at least one boat day into the celebration; most couples wish they had built two.

Season, heat and the table

The Amalfi season runs May to early October. July and August are hot, busy and expensive — beautiful, but the coast at its most crowded. May, June and September are the editor's months: warm sea, long light, and a coastline that can breathe. October is for romantics happy to trade some heat for empty villages and a softer sun; by November much of the coast closes for winter.

And then there is the food. A Campanian wedding is a feast — seafood, the region's lemons in everything, buffalo mozzarella, wines from the volcanic slopes — run late and generous over many courses. Build the evening around the table and the bay, and let dinner be the event it is in Italy.

Arrival and the islands beyond

Naples International is the gateway, an hour or so from Sorrento by car or, more grandly, by private transfer and boat. The city itself is worth a night for the brave — pizza in its birthplace, the archaeological museum — but most wedding parties press straight on to the coast.

Beyond the wedding, the bay is full of further days: Capri and Ischia by boat, Pompeii and Herculaneum under Vesuvius, and the Cilento coast quieter to the south. A villa estate gives the party the run of the gardens; the coast's grand hotels handle larger guest lists, and many couples combine the two.