Annalisa De Carlo
15 September 2025
Everyone goes in July and August. Here is why September is the month that rewards you properly — and what to expect at each point in the calendar.
There is a version of the Amalfi Coast that most Australians experience, and it involves standing in a slow-moving queue of hire cars on the SS163, sweating through a linen shirt, watching a tour bus inch past a barrier with approximately forty centimetres to spare. It is still beautiful. It is Italy's most dramatic coastline and one of the most photographed stretches of road in Europe. But there is another version, available to those willing to reorganise their calendar by four to six weeks.
September is when the Amalfi Coast becomes itself again.
The water temperature in September typically sits around 25 degrees — warmer than any month before it, because the Tyrrhenian sea takes the whole summer to heat up properly. The crowds, having peaked in late July and August, begin their gradual withdrawal. The hillside restaurants stop running waiting lists. The private lidos have space. The roads, while never empty, return to something approaching navigable.
The light changes too. August on the Amalfi is a white, high-noon, squinting light that flattens the landscape. September's light arrives at an angle — the Italian term luce dorata (golden light) exists for a reason, and late September afternoons on the Positano terraces are the reason. Your photographs will look less like a document of having been somewhere and more like a painting.
What about the shoulder season either side?
May and June are genuinely excellent, and we recommend them almost as highly as September. The wildflowers on the coastal paths are at their best in April and early May. The sea is cool — bracing rather than swimming-warm — but the landscape compensation is considerable. June brings warmth without the Italian holiday peak, which mostly arrives in August.
October is quieter still, and some find it too quiet: certain restaurants close from the first week, ferry services reduce, and the occasional autumnal rain reminds you that this is a Mediterranean coast, not a tropical one. That said, October on the Amalfi has a melancholy beauty that some travellers prefer precisely for its solitude.
The honest case against July and August
We will still take you in July and August if that is when you can travel — and we will arrange it well. But let us be transparent: the traffic on the coastal road can add hours to journeys. Positano, Amalfi town, and Ravello are genuinely overcrowded. Restaurant quality declines as kitchens operate at maximum capacity. The lidos are full by 10am.
More importantly, the experience of Italy's most cinematic coastline is substantially diminished when shared with a hundred thousand other people having the identical experience simultaneously.
Our recommendation
If your travel dates are flexible, aim for the second half of September. Book accommodation slightly outside the main towns — Praiano sits between Positano and Amalfi and offers genuine quiet, excellent sea access, and a local restaurant scene that has not entirely redirected itself toward tourist plates.
If September is not possible, May and early June are our second choice. The coast is green, the ferries run their full schedule, and you will swim in the sea if you are Australian, because you are accustomed to the Southern Ocean and 22-degree water is, in relative terms, a bath.
Whatever month you choose, arrive by boat from Naples rather than by road. The water approach to Positano — watching the town reveal itself in layers from the sea — is not negotiable. It is how this coast should first be seen, and nothing that follows will quite replicate the feeling of watching those pastel houses arrange themselves above you as the ferry slows into the harbour.
