Positano, Amalfi Coast: Positively bliss

From Naples the road slinks improbably around the coastline, skirting past Sorrento and heaving over a headland before corkscrewing above a blue sea. Positano is jammed into a fold in the cliffs, and looks as if it could easily slide down with a clatter onto its beach far below. There is only space for a one-way road, and it plunges halfway down the town before surging up again, scraping by cafe chairs, postcard racks and wayside statues of the Virgin Mary.

Positano on Italy's Amalfi Coast is for visitors with a head for heights and who are confident behind the steering wheel. With relief I leave my car with Le Sirenuse's bellboy. Where it goes is anyone's guess; flat land for car parks is as rare as reindeer here. Mostly, in this cliff-clinging town, I tumble down steps and huff-puff back up again on foot, alternatively enclosed in canyon-like streets or propelled onto pocket-sized terraces with views over vertiginous rooftops to shockingly blue-green water.

Le Sirenuse opened in 1951 in a converted aristocratic house, and is still owned by the same family. Somehow it has found room to expand, oozing like calcium deposits down the cliff and taking over neighbouring buildings. The result is a warren-like hotel over eight floors, crammed with art works and antiques. Every cranny is mopped and polished. Prints and family oil portraits line the walls, pillows are plump, restaurant tablecloths starched as a pope's robes. The candlelit, Michelin-starred La Sponda restaurant features fish sprinkled with zucchini flowers and Mediterranean lamb encrusted with rosemary. The pool terrace, shaded by lemon trees, is surely one of the world's best.

Guestrooms have swallow's nest balconies entwined in vines and bougainvillea, and Positano's finest outlooks. The peacock sea far below gets more beautiful as the day progresses. At sunset, after the day-tripper boats have departed, the silvery water is scribbled over by the wakes of the odd speedboat. I feel like leaping off my balcony, like the cliff-divers of Acapulco, and into its limpid loveliness.

The views are everything in Positano, and Le Sirenuse knows it. The hotel does everything superlatively but always accepts that its service and luxuries are second fiddle to the landscape. It's rather lovely that staff gardeners take you on a tour of the rare flowering plants that grace the hotel terraces, but my attention constantly drifts away to the Mediterranean. And though the breakfast spread isp first-class, its terrace location is so fabulous you'd hardly notice if you were served sawdust.

Actually, you're served a banquet to delight Nero that, in the Italian style, features a temptation of cakes. I assuage my guilt by walking off my indulgences with a 2000-step haul up to Nocelle, a cloud-enveloped village surrounded by terraces of tomato vines and lemon trees.

Later I explore Positano itself. It's an old town, once part of the medieval Amalfi maritime republic that rivalled Venice for trade, now jammed with shops selling ceramics and art works. I climb past an old watchtower on a track lined with cactus and bougainvillea to Spiaggia del Fornillo, a quiet cove where striped parasols lean in the sand.