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Salerno sits at the southern end of the Gulf of Salerno, where the Amalfi Coast's drama gives way to a city with its own unhurried confidence. It is a working Campanian port rather than a resort, and that distinction matters enormously to how it feels on the ground. The medieval centre climbs from the waterfront promenade, the Lungomare Trieste, up through a tangle of lanes towards the Norman cathedral of San Matteo, consecrated in 1084 and still commanding the old town with the authority of a city that was, in the eleventh century, one of the most important in southern Italy. The Schola Medica Salernitana, widely regarded as the first medical school in the Western world, was founded here, and that legacy of serious intellectual life sits quietly beneath the surface of a city that tourists often pass through rather than pause in.

The old town rewards the pause. Via dei Mercanti runs through the historic core as it has for centuries, lined with small shops and the kind of bars where the coffee is taken standing at the counter. The Castello di Arechi, a Lombard fortification later expanded by the Normans, rises on the hill above and offers a view that takes in the entire gulf, from the Cilento coast to the south to the faint outline of Capri on a clear day. The Archaeological Museum of the Province of Salerno, housed in the former monastery of San Benedetto, holds Greek and Roman material from the surrounding region, including finds from the ancient city of Paestum to the south, whose Doric temples are among the best-preserved in the world.