THE AMALFI COAST AS YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN IT: FROM THE WATER

The Amalfi Coast was built to be seen from the water. Only from a boat do you understand what they meant.

For centuries, the only way to reach these villages was by sea. The houses were stacked on the cliffs facing the water, the churches turned towards the boats, the beaches hidden from those who came by land and obvious to those who came from the sea. To see the Amalfi Coast from a boat is not a tourist activity. It is to see the coast as it was conceived.

The architecture that can only be read from the water. Positano, from land, is an endless staircase. From the sea, it is something else: a cascade of peach, ochre and white houses tumbling down to the water, with the majolica dome of Santa Maria Assunta at its centre. No street photograph captures it. You have to move out onto the water and look back.

The grottoes where the light enters from below. By boat you reach what the land hides. The Grotta Azzurra of Capri, where the light passes through the water beneath the rock and fills the cave with an electric blue. The Grotta dello Smeraldo of Conca dei Marini, where the same phenomenon happens in emerald green. They are colours that cannot be explained. It was they that gave the blue to the Capri swimsuit and the gradient to the Marini bikini.

The Faraglioni and the islands of the sirens. To pass by boat beneath the arch of the Faraglioni, in Capri, is a small ritual: they say it brings luck, and some seal the moment with a kiss. Further north, off Positano, lie the islands of Li Galli, the islands of the sirens, the ones whose song Ulysses is said to have heard as he passed, and which the dancer Rudolf Nureyev bought so he could dance on them far from the world.

The fjord the road does not show. The fjord of Furore, between Positano and Amalfi, is almost invisible from above. Only from the water do you make out the sliver of beach beneath the stone bridge, wedged between vertical cliffs, with the old fishermen's houses clinging to the rock. It is the most dramatic landscape on the coast, and the hardest to find without a boat.

A day at sea has its own rhythm and its own wardrobe. You go with little: the swimsuit you put on in the morning and do not change, a linen shirt for the wind, a necklace that withstands the salt, a pair of dark glasses. It is the simplest day to dress and the most beautiful to remember. Perhaps that is the true lesson of the coast seen from the sea: that the most beautiful things are almost always the ones you see slowly, from afar, and in no hurry to arrive.Sofia Godinho