Down there, loungers spill across the rocks, and time slows in that delicious, almost syrupy way only southern Italy can manage. You can spend the entire afternoon watching the light shift over the water, counting boats and sometimes not counting anything at all. You don’t need an itinerary at Il San Pietro di Positano. In fact, it’s better if you don’t have one. Because once you arrive, the compulsion to do anything falls away. You eat your meals, yes extraordinary meals, from the Michelin-starred restaurant Zass that will make you cry tears of joy. Amalfi’s culinary traditions may have humble, rural roots, but they are layered with complexity, richness and a deep respect for local ingredients. Zass takes those roots seriously with vegetables cooked simply, herbs picked hours before service, olive oil that tastes green and alive. There’s fish that is always local, often line-caught. Lemon and anchovy, garlic and basil, the rhythm of the land guiding the plate. It is rather recognisably southern Italian. A pea soup that’s delicate, light, ethereal and disappeared as soon as it appeared. A tomato pasta that illustrates the genius of simplicity and some amazing protein and meat where words on paper can not do justice to what the chefs craft on plates.
You order spritzes at times of day when spritzes feel particularly correct. At the pasta making class, you eavesdrop on conversations in languages you don’t speak. You imagine lives you’ll not live — of being the pizza man or the happy sommelier who spoke fluent wine. And I promise, in the midst of this lovely, slow, unravelling, you will forget to check your phone. When a place can hush the constant itch for stimulation, when it can hold you with nothing but its presence, that’s when you know it’s special. That’s when you know you’ve arrived somewhere that won’t just fill your days, but it will change the rhythm of your thoughts.
