Amalfi Coast is the destination of a lot of great travelers that during the centuries they chose to reach this far in search of something that could satisfy their need of uniqueness.

Amalfi Coast did not take part of Grand Tour early, the phenomenon which involved thousands of European aristocrats starting from the XVII, especially for a geographic position away from the streets that conjoined the places of interest. Even if in late, however, it managed to attract people that here they found inspiration for their art or simply the quiet of their soul. It offers landscapes that save the precious elements to the inspiration of European romanticism: the pristine nature of the valley, the industrial ruins covered by the vegetation, inhabitants authenticity. In short, a place that seemed to have remained on the periphery of evolution while preserving the character.

The arrival to the Coast it was an adventure, to fight the nature relying on their own strength. The coast road would be finished in the second half of 1800 and so or they had to cross the mountains that close by arched the territory or getting on the board in Vietri and then reach it on foot either or on pack animals the various centers that opened half-way.

During the middle 1800s the german historian Ferdinand Gregorovius in his “pilgrimage in Italy” he could write some intact atmosphere of the Coast with these words:“we arrived to the ancient Ravello and suddenly among these wild rocks, we find ourselves in front of a Moorish city with its towers and houses by fantastic arabesques it offered an arab aspect completely. The city was built by black tuff, isolated and abandoned in the green desert of the mountain. Here the world is disappeared there is nothing more than trees and rocks. Below us, at an unreal distance the “purple see”. At the end of 1800s another german, the compositor Richard Wagner was astonished by the Villa Rufolo building. So as to it inspired him the labyrinthic structure of the Klingsor magician’s garden in Parsifal.

The painters find inspiration for their paints travelling with their job equipment paths more or less hidden they leave us testimonies of clean skies which the light blue that confused with the blue sea and the vallies that appeared as perfect copy of those imaginated for the Eden.

Even the urban centers inspired the travellers: their lines that seemed to cross at every angle, the alleys appeared to northern European more as tunnel than roads, the roads became tracks to the top, toward the dazzling light of the sun. And here again in the first decades of 1900 the duch graphic and incisor Maurits Cornelis Escher, that here stayed more times, he turned those lines into work of art mixing the graphics of his technique to the local urbanistic reality.

But the Amalfi Coast was also a refuge. Safe retreat for those fleeing the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century which they opposed with the force of their intellectual training. German and Russian painters managed to create almost a small community in Positano, Amalfi, and Vietri, transferring into the sunny colors of the Coast the artistic language they had learned at home.