Everyone tells you to go to Positano. Positano is lovely and also, by ten in the morning, a wall of sun hats and selfie sticks funneling down eight hundred stairs to a beach the size of a tennis court. Twenty minutes east, past Amalfi and Atrani, the road drops into Cetara, a village of about nine hundred people built into a ravine so narrow the houses seem to be holding each other up.

There's a reason Cetara stays quiet: no beach club culture, just a working harbor. The anchovy fleet goes out before sunrise and comes back around seven, and if you're standing on the jetty when they do, someone will hand you a fish still cold from the crate, just to watch your face.

The village's whole economy runs on colatura di alici, an amber anchovy extract pressed and aged in chestnut barrels, and at Al Convento — a trattoria wedged between the church and a laundry line — they'll pour it over spaghetti with nothing else but garlic, chili, and parsley. It tastes like the sea decided to become a sauce. I ate it three nights running and do not regret a single bowl.

Mornings here have a rhythm worth rearranging your trip around: the boats return, the bar on the piazza opens, and by seven-thirty half the village is standing at the counter drinking espresso out of glass cups, no sugar, gone in two sips. Nobody sits down. Sitting down is for tourists and funerals.

If you want the coastal views without the coastal crowds, walk the old mule path from Cetara up to Punta Fuenti — forty minutes of switchbacks through lemon terraces, ending at a headland where the water goes from turquoise to navy in one visible line, like someone drew a border in the sea.

Getting there: SITA buses run the coastal road from Salerno or Amalfi; the Cetara stop is easy to miss, so tell the driver where you're headed.

Best months: May and September — warm water, thinner crowds, cheaper rooms.