POSITANO

The other chief show-places on this stretch of coast, which curves south into the Gulf of Salerno, are Positano, Sorrento, Amalfi and Ravello, although to the cognoscenti only Positano counts, Ravello being too far from the sea and Sorrento and Amalfi merely for tourists.

Since Positano has no harbor, you have to anchor offshore and row into the beach, which, on the day that we were there, seemed to have been taken over almost completely by the English, with a light salting of Italian girls too bare, brown, and beautiful to be described in the language appropriate to travel literature. The town itself, built on a steep hillside, shares with Capri the boon of having no automobile traffic. It is an imaginatively irregular village, given over, as far as I could see, almost completely to the pleasures of summer, and it is the only town I have ever seen in which one of the main thoroughfares is shadowed from one end to the other by the leaves of an abundant grape arbor.

A gallery and summer art school has been set up in the generous rooms of a converted palazzo halfway up the hill, and you can buy the works of Italian abstractionists there for only a little more than you would pay in Rome, or you can take life classes for two weeks for a reasonable fee or find out how difficult it is to paint landscapes as romantically opulent as these under the bright summer sun.

One of the ladies who runs the art gallery is a vigorous young American who has been coming to Positano for several years now and who says, of course, that it has changed, it has been discovered, it has been spoiled, but that she likes it a lot better that way. She was obviously a woman of character, so we invited her to dinner that night.