The coast’s ceramics capital and its eastern doorstep, a town of bright majolica, painted domes, and the easiest arrival on the whole Amalfitana.
Why a day here
Vietri has made hand-painted majolica since the 1400s, and it’s still the place to buy it: workshops and shops stacked with tiles, plates, and the famous ceramic donkeys, at the source and at real prices. It’s also the easiest coast town to reach, right next to Salerno, which makes it the perfect half-day.
Getting there
Vietri sits at the eastern end, a few minutes from Salerno. A short bus or taxi, and it has its own station on the Salerno rail line. From here the SS163 and the ferries head west along the coast. The most painless town to reach on the Amalfitana.
Give it
A half day, plus shopping
Bigger and more workaday than the postcard towns west of it, Vietri is a real place that happens to be beautiful: the tiled dome of San Giovanni Battista over the roofs, ceramic shopfronts everywhere, and a proper beach, Marina di Vietri, below. Half the coast’s tiles were painted here.
The ceramics. Walk the shops along Corso Umberto and buy the real thing; the majolica dome of the mother church; and the view back over the whole coast from the Vietri overlook, the classic first-or-last photo of the Amalfitana.
Vietri’s majolica goes back to the 1400s and boomed again in the 1920s and ’30s, when foreign artists, in the town’s “German period”, brought a bold modern style that collectors now chase. The ceramic museum up at Villa Guariglia tells the story, and the bright hand-painted riggiole tiles you see on domes and stair-risers all along the coast were very often fired right here.
Vietri sul Mare on the map