Italy Honeymoon Guide 2025: The Destinations That Deliver Real Romance

How the Amalfi Coast became the world's most famous romantic destination

The Amalfi Coast's international romantic reputation was essentially constructed by American cultural exports of the 1950s-1960s: John Steinbeck's 1953 Harper's Bazaar essay on Positano, the Hollywood film Beat the Devil (Huston, 1953, filmed in Ravello), and the explosion of Via Veneto-era Italian cinema that used the coast as the aspirational backdrop for the dolce vita. Before the 1950s, the Amalfi Coast was a locally significant medieval maritime power (Amalfi was one of Italy's four maritime republics — Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, and Pisa — and published the "Tavola Amalfitana," the first maritime code in European history, c. 1095) that had declined economically but retained its landscape. The American cultural imprint transformed it into an international romantic icon within a single decade. The photographs that made Positano famous (specifically the vertiginous cliff village seen from the sea) were used in US travel advertising campaigns from the late 1950s and became one of the most reproduced travel images of the 20th century. The consequence: a village that in 1950 had no international reputation now has a global waiting list for its most sought-after hotel rooms and a summer tourist density that would have been unimaginable to the fishing families who built it.