To get from Naples train station to a tiny town called San Lazzaro in a region called Agerola, it’s a 30 minute ride on the Circumvesuviana and then an hour-long bus ride that winds up the steep precipices of the mountains behind the better-known towns of the Amalfi coast – famous Amalfi itself, Positano, Ravello. The Circumvesuviana is a hurtling, jostling train covered in graffiti that links the scattered towns that sit around the bay of Naples, under and adjacent to the volcano that could bury them all at any time – Mt. Vesuvius.
Off the Beaten Path in the Amalfi Coast
Most tourists stay in the more obvious coastal towns mentioned above; if, however, you’re on a strict budget and have a desire to get to the nitty gritty of life in southern, rural Italy, you might opt to stay in San Lazzarro. I checked into my hotel – a converted monastery now part of a private residence, with rusty mobile homes out back you can choose to rent out as an alternative to the dorm – and then went to explore the views from the edge of town. If you look on a map Agerola appears to be set back from the coastline; in actuality, the coast rises from the sea at such an angle that when you’re standing at the edge of the cliffs in Agerola the beaches of Amalfi and Positano appear to be straight down below you.
People take the SITA bus to get to the main coastal towns or – if they have a death wish, in my opinion – they take their own cars or (gulp!) motorbikes. Riding on the bus is, in a word, SCARY. It feels like at any moment the bus might sprout wings and instead of turning suddenly and desperately toward the mountain, as it does every few seconds, it will just fly off the edge. Even with the fear and white knuckles gripping the seat, when the surroundings are this mesmerizing, when the blue of the sky melts into the color of the sea, you almost wish it would.
That first afternoon in Agerola, the man who ran the hostel handed me a bus schedule, explained that the SITA bus came about once every two hours to the main square in San Lazzaro. The ride to Amalfi would take about an hour. “And that’s the only way down?” I asked him. “Yes,” he replied quickly, but then added with a sort of sigh, “well, there is also the walk.”
Walk?
I found out from him that yes, it is possible to walk to Amalfi and because of the winding, twisting SITA route, it only takes about 45 minutes longer than riding on the bus. When I asked him exactly how far, in kilometers, he answered “2500 steps downward.”
Solo hiking on the Amalfi Coast is not the same as solo traveling
I set off to do this walk at around 11AM, warned by the man to bring plenty of sunscreen and water; nary a cloud in the sky and the 90 degree heat would do me in if I wasn’t careful. At the bottom of the steps, he told me, it was another 2 kilometers on the road to get to Amalfi’s town center. I checked with him that I wouldn’t – couldn’t – get lost, since I am a wanderer with no internal compass and I do so very easily, and I took off on my own to the entrance to the steps, inconspicuously next door to a bar called Leonardo’s. No sign about the path, and not another soul entering or exiting, had me slightly nervous about this little adventure I was about to embark on.
After about 15 minutes I started counting the steps. I didn’t see another soul, unless you count a dog, for about an hour, or 1200-ish steps. Hostel man had warned me my knees would start to wobble about halfway down, and he was right.
I stopped several times, not only to rest my snappy, shaky knees but also to admire the views in every direction. Peering back, Agerola and the cliffs rose behind me with all sorts of interesting pockets and mysterious, tiny buildings on the mountainside, and lemon groves. Stretching out before me was the bright blue water of the Tyrrhenian sea. Looking down, I could see the coast slowly rising up to meet me.
At the time, I wasn’t what you’d call a very experienced hiker, and I had never gone hiking solo. I was an experienced solo traveler at this point, but to be alone surrounded by that much space was different. This was a loneliness I had never felt before – a really peaceful yet exhilarating kind of solitude. I did wonder a few times if I fell or got bitten by a python (it’s amazing what the imagination does when coupled with adrenaline) but the experience was worth the risk.
I reached the bottom of the steps – not without a few semi-wrong turns and help from a man who knew not a word of English but who was able to literally point me in the right direction – and realized that the 2km walk would be on the same death-defying roads the SITA bus takes, which has no shoulder and can barely fit 2 cars. Buses, cars and bikes are constantly having to back up in order to make room for others to pass at certain turns. How was I going to fit into this equation?
The Path of the Goat
At one point I looked over the edge of the road and saw the most spectacular looking beach, but it was so far down from where I was that I could only imagine it involved a few hundred more steps down, if I could even find them. I felt like I was floating on an unattached cloud.
Eventually, I got aboard the SITA bus which makes its way all the way to Sorrento, and the bus driver asked where I was going. When it came out that this was my first ride around the coast on the SITA, he forced another rider, an older Italian man, to move over so I could have a front row seat and a first-rate view. During the 30 minute ride the old man had several outbursts in Italian – so I couldn’t understand much of what he was saying – during which he would sometimes point and sometimes shake his fist. A few times he shouted “Sophia Loren!” and I think he was trying to show me where her house was? I can’t really be sure.
Another man across the aisle chatted me up. He was born and raised in Positano, and when I told him I was from New York he asked me if I knew a place in Little Italy called Mario’s Restaurant. I confessed I did not. He said, “well, that’s my buddy! Mario!” and then proceeded to ask me the same question – Francesco, Lorenzo etc – about Boston, Chicago etc. He has a lot of friends in the U.S.
He handed me a business card and told me he’s a “mountain man,” taking tourists on wilderness trips on the coastal mountains and cliffs. “Oh really?” I said, “well today I walked to Amalfi from Agerola, you must know that route then? the 2500 steps?”
Mr. Positano looked at me, wide-eyed. “You took the path of the Goat?!?”
Yes, I told him. I took the path of the goat.
A long time afterwards I came to find out that locally this hike is known as the Path of the Gods, but I had misunderstood his accent. Path of the Gods makes sense too, the way the path seemed to descend from the sky. But Goats like hiking too.