Amalfi in October, When the Lemons Come Down

By October, the Amalfi Coast exhales. The summer crowds have gone home, the yachts have slipped south, and the narrow road that clings to the cliffs is navigable again by something other than patience. The sea is still warm enough to swim in. The light has softened from glare to gold. And on the terraces above the villages, the second lemon harvest is beginning.

This is the season we would choose, if we could only choose one.

The lemon terraces

The lemons of this coast are not like other lemons. They are large and knobbly, with thick, fragrant peel and a sweetness that makes it possible to eat them sliced, with a little sugar, like fruit. They grow on terraces cut into the mountainside centuries ago, shaded by pergolas of chestnut poles and dark netting that protects them from wind and hail.

Many of the old groves are still worked by hand, by families who carry the harvest down steep stone steps in baskets on their shoulders. A few welcome visitors for a walk among the trees, followed by lunch. Go. Arrive in the late morning, when the scent of the leaves is strongest in the warm air.

A table under the pergola

The lunch we have in mind takes place on a terrace high above the sea, at a long table under the lemons. There is no menu. The grandmother of the house cooks, and you eat what she has decided.

It begins with bread and a dish of the family’s olive oil, grassy and peppery. Then fresh anchovies, marinated in lemon juice and a little chilli. A plate of fried zucchini flowers. Pasta with lemon and butter and a snowfall of aged cheese, which sounds too simple until you taste it and understand that simplicity is the whole idea.

Then fish, whatever the boats brought in that morning, baked whole on a bed of lemon leaves. A salad of tomatoes still warm from the garden. A glass of local white wine from the steep vineyards a little further up the coast, mineral and bright.

The long afternoon

Lunch here does not end so much as fade. Dessert is a lemon cake, or a delizia, a dome of sponge soaked in limoncello and covered in lemon cream. Then a small glass of the limoncello itself, made by the family from the peel of their own fruit and kept in the freezer until it is thick and cold.

At some point coffee arrives. At some point the light shifts and the sea below turns from blue to silver. Nobody looks at a watch. Nobody suggests moving on. This is, after all, what the afternoon is for.

The coast in the shoulder season

October also changes the villages themselves. In Positano, the steep lanes that were impassable in August are pleasant again. In Ravello, high on its ridge, the gardens of the old villas are almost empty in the mornings, their terraces looking out over a coastline that seems to go on forever.

The water remains warm well into the month. Book a wooden boat for a day and follow the coast west toward Capri, stopping in small coves reachable only from the sea. Swim off the side. Eat a plate of spaghetti with clams at a beach restaurant whose tables are set on the rocks, its season just about to close.

Where to stay

We favour the smaller houses here: a restored palazzo on the cliff above a quiet village, a dozen rooms, terraces planted with bougainvillea and the inevitable lemons. The best rooms have tiled floors in the old blue-and-yellow ceramics of Vietri, and windows framing nothing but sea.

Ask for a room with a terrace facing west. The sunset in October comes earlier and lasts longer, a slow fade from apricot to rose that turns the cliffs the colour of old brick.

The last night

On your final evening, walk down to the harbour as the fishing boats go out. The air smells of salt and wood smoke and, faintly, of lemons. Somewhere above, in the terraces, a family is sorting the day’s harvest. Some of the fruit will become limoncello. Some will be sent to markets in Naples. And some, inevitably, will end up on a long table under a pergola, waiting for the next guest to understand why nobody here is ever in a hurry.