Tramonti

Tramonti is the Amalfi Coast that does not face the sea. The comune covers thirteen hamlets on the inland Lattari slopes above Maiori, with the seat of Polvica and the higher frazioni climbing past six hundred, each linked by old mule tracks rather than a single main street. It was an important town of the Maritime Republic of Amalfi between 839 and around 1200, sitting on the inland side of the ridge that divides the coast from the Sorrento peninsula and, by way of the Valico di Chiunzi, from the Sarno valley beyond.

Two exports carried the village name further than the village itself: fiordilatte mozzarella from the high pastures, and the long-fermented pizza dough that emigrants took north in the post-war years to found most of the historic pizzerias of Piedmont and Lombardy. The slopes fall within the UNESCO Amalfi Coast site and the Monti Lattari Park, with chestnut forest and limoncello distilleries on every road. A comune this scattered, with its parishes on separate ridges and its produce known abroad before the place itself, reads less like one town than a federation of hamlets that happened to share a name.