First view of Atrani
While bicycling through Italy I painted more than forty postcards to mail to people, and afterwards got access to a few of them, such as this, which had so browned in sunlight that the blue-greens of the sea and red on the church campanile had almost vanished.

The road has been scrambling along the cliffs of the Sorrentine peninsula; ahead appears this built-upon crag. The road squeezes around it—

Atrani, looking back on first corner

And the interior of Atrani comes into view—

[PICTURE of beetling heights on the west, to be scanned]

I became fascinated enough with Atrani to stay there several days. In this diagram—

—some of the notes say "huge cliffs actually overhanging", "eastern ness of houses", "warren of houses threaded by tunnels and steps—no streets", "river-like only street", "west precipice of houses", "prodigious beetling heights", "sides of this crag also encrusted with houses", "east arch only goes into space with boats (see last sketch but one)", "west arch for road", "coast road to Atrani, doubling back", "through tunnel and immediately into Amalfi".

Atrani fills a short steep valley that slides down to the sea between the rock-reef with the church on, to the east, and the taller rock-reef to the west. The modern road comes around the east reef, is slung high across the front of the town, then dives by a tunnel through the west reef to come out in the larger and more famous town Amalfi.

The road almost has no communication with Atrani. You have to double back from it, just before the tunnel, by a ramp that leads down to the beach, and thus, through one of three arches under the highway, into the little town's piazza. Within the town there is only one street; steeply descending, it is surfaced with cobbles in the typical Italian pattern of continually overlapping arcs, suggesting waves in a chute of water—and indeed the street is no more than a covering over the stream. The rest of the town is a mass of dwellings piled over each other, threaded by alleys that are often staircases or tunnels.

Atrani from above
Up the valley behind climb decks of vineyards, and beside them a rock-cut stepped footpath to Ravello, which peeps over the high horizon.