The Amalfi Coast without the crush: alternatives to Positano, cheaper and less crowded

Positano is beautiful, and it shows: in high season the Via Krupp and the Spiaggia Grande become a funnel of people, parking exceeds 30 euros a day, and a night under the dome of Santa Maria Assunta starts at four-figure sums. If you're looking for an alternative to Positano that keeps the sea, the stone and the Campanian cuisine but removes the crush (and halves the bill), the good news is that Campania is much wider than those few kilometres of coast. Thirty or forty minutes, or a regional train, is enough to change the atmosphere and the prices completely.

The Cilento

The first move is to head south, into the Cilento. It's the coast the Campanians choose when the Amalfi Coast becomes unbearable: broad beaches, some kilometres long (in Positano they're coves between the rocks), Blue Flags one after another, and honest rates. Castellabate, Acciaroli, Palinuro and Marina di Camerota offer turquoise sea without the fleecing. And the Cilento interior offers stops the Amalfi Coast doesn't have: at Roscigno Vecchia you walk through a village abandoned to early-twentieth-century landslides, with its square, fountain and church left intact like an open-air set. Further south, in the Vallo di Diano, the early Christian baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte at Padula is worth the detour, a fourth-to-fifth-century basin fed by a spring that still flows today beneath the vaults.

If instead you stay near Salerno but want to avoid the wall of cars on the main road, head for the heights above the plain: the cave-sanctuary of San Michele at Olevano sul Tusciano is a cavity with frescoed early-medieval chapels, reachable on foot by reservation, where instead of a selfie in a queue you find silence and a view that reaches the sea. It's the kind of experience the coast, by now, struggles to give.

Naples

Then there's the most underrated alternative: Naples. Many use it only as a stopover for the ferry, but the city is a seaside city in every respect, and much cheaper. At Borgo Marinari, beneath Castel dell'Ovo, and in the Pallonetto of Santa Lucia you have the fishermen's harbour, the seafront promenade and a fried-fish meal at neighbourhood prices, not brand prices. Behind the tourist scenes, the Rione Sanità is today one of the liveliest places: the "hawk's wing" staircases designed by Sanfelice are pure Baroque hidden in the courtyards, and a few metres below you descend to the Greek hypogeum of the Crypt of the Cristallini, Hellenistic burial chambers reopened only recently. In the same area, the Catacombs of San Gennaro tell of early Christian Naples with frescoes and galleries on two levels. And if you want to understand the real city without the river of people that now clogs Via dei Tribunali, the Cortile delle Statue a stone's throw from the Quartieri Spagnoli shows how the authentic and the crowded coexist just metres apart: you only need to know where to turn.

Irpinia

For those willing to leave the sea entirely in exchange for low prices and empty roads, Irpinia is the most secret Campania. At Bisaccia, in upper Irpinia, the ducal castle and the stone village look out towards Apulia, and the restaurants cost a fraction of those on the coast. In the hills near Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi, the Cistercian ruins of the Abbey of Goleto give the kind of quiet that in Ravello, by now, comes at a high price. And towards Caserta, in ancient Capua, the basilica of Sant'Angelo in Formis guards a cycle of eleventh-century Romanesque frescoes that alone are worth the trip: a "Sistine Chapel of the Middle Ages" with no gatekeeping ticket office and no queues.

Practical tips

One final practical note. If you really don't want to give up the Amalfi Coast, the trick isn't the place but the calendar: aim for Atrani, Minori, Maiori or Scala, sleep there and move by ferry or bus (a car here is only a cost and a stress), and choose April, May or October. Outside July and August, even Positano becomes breathable again. But if the goal is to spend less and walk without rubbing elbows, the alternatives above give you the same Campania, with more space and more truth.

Practical guides for Amalfi

• Where to stay in Amalfi
• What to see in Amalfi in 2 days
• Where to eat in Amalfi
• How to get to Amalfi