Cilento, Vallo di Diano e Alburni
Italy's second-largest park — karst mountains meeting a temple coast, from the Alburni caves and Cervati's summit to Palinuro's arches and the village where the Mediterranean diet got its name.
South of the Amalfi drive the coast stops performing and starts working. The Cilento is the big, slow peninsula between the Gulf of Salerno and the Gulf of Policastro — olive terraces, holm-oak mountains, fishing towns that empty in winter — and the national park behind it, formalised in 1995, is Italy's second largest. Its skeleton is karst: Monte Cervati, Campania's highest at 1,899 metres, wears a summit chapel to the Madonna della Neve; the Alburni massif runs for twenty-five kilometres as a limestone bastion drilled with more than four hundred caves, including Castelcivita and Pertosa, where the visit begins by boat on an underground river. UNESCO has listed the whole ensemble — park, Paestum, Velia and the Certosa di Padula — as a World Heritage cultural landscape.
Antiquity brackets the coast. At the northern edge stand Paestum's three Doric temples, the best-preserved Greek architecture west of Greece; halfway down lie the ruins of Velia, the Elea of Parmenides and Zeno, where western philosophy took its first steps in the shade of what is now a fig-grown acropolis. The shore between and beyond them belongs to Capo Palinuro — named for Aeneas's drowned helmsman, ringed by sea caves and a natural arch — to the coves of Marina di Camerota and the protected inlet of Porto Infreschi, and to the sea-cliff stations of Primula palinuri, the pale rock primrose that survives only on this stretch of Tyrrhenian limestone and serves as the park's emblem.
The park's most exported idea is on the table. The American physiologist Ancel Keys settled at Pioppi, a one-street seafront hamlet, and spent forty years documenting why his fishermen neighbours outlived his compatriots; the "Mediterranean diet" was coined from this coast, and UNESCO's 2010 listing names the Cilento as an emblematic community. Inland, the villages that produce it — white Dottato figs, myrtle-wrapped mozzarella nelle mortelle, mountain chickpeas — are depopulating, and the park doubles as a holding action. Otters hunt the Calore gorges below Cervati; wolves have re-thickened in the beech woods above.
What's worth knowing before you go
The Salerno–Sapri railway threads the coast (Agropoli, Vallo della Lucania, Pisciotta, all with stations); the interior needs a car and patience with its roads. Swim in June or September — August is the region's own holiday month and the coast towns quadruple. The Alburni caves are a year-round, any-weather card.
The connoisseur's date is the fifth of August on Cervati, when the men of Sanza carry the Madonna della Neve to the summit chapel through the beech woods before dawn — or, less strenuously, Pertosa's underground river followed by the Certosa di Padula's 320-room silence in the same Vallo di Diano afternoon.