Atrani — Piazza Umberto I and the beach arch

Atrani is a kilometre from Amalfi and gets a fraction of the visitors. The whole town fits in a ravine: houses stacked on houses, stairways instead of streets, and at the bottom one small square with arcades on three sides and a short tunnel through the fourth that leads to the sand.

That tunnel arch is the picture everyone remembers — shot from the beach it frames the lit square and the church steps beyond, and from inside the square it frames the sea. Around it, the stepped alleys give endless close backgrounds: peeling plaster in ochre and pink, arches over the path, laundry, and the domed bell tower of San Salvatore de Birecto appearing above the roofs.

Because the ravine is deep and faces east, direct sun reaches the square only in the morning and leaves early; the rest of the day is soft open shade, which is genuinely useful in summer when the rest of the coast is harsh. The beach is small and gets busy in August but never approaches Amalfi's density. Everything is within two hundred metres, though almost all of it involves steps — worth flagging for anyone with mobility limits.