Positano / Amalfi Coast

Positano is the clearest case this register has of a place that is itself the resort. The town is a staircase: one road enters from above, one beach closes it from below, and between them the houses stand on each other's roofs. No hotel here can own enough ground to be a world of its own, because there is no flat ground to own. What a house can be is an address on the stair, and that is the whole of what this lens measures.

Before the war the town had boarding houses and no hotel of this class. The grand houses came afterwards and in order: a Neapolitan family opened its own villa to guests in 1951, and the town's other grand house followed two decades later. The register keeps them in that order rather than levelling them into one period, because the sequence is the story.

The Positano rule is named after this place and is tested here first. In any legendary place the one or two houses that hold real territory belong to Private Resorts and the addresses without territory belong here. Along this coast the territory is Villa TreVille's; the rest are addresses, and the register says so even where the key disagrees with it.

The season runs from late March to the end of October, and the town empties around the houses rather than the houses closing on the town. Ravello sits above the same coast with its own character and its own addresses, and this page carries them under one roster place because the roster does, not because the two towns are the same.