Scala

We almost didn’t stop in Scala. Lia and I had driven up from Amalfi with Ravello as the plan, one of those days where you tell yourself you’ll just glance at the map and then somehow end up somewhere else entirely. But the road bent, a sign for Scala appeared, and I remembered reading that this scrappy little town, not its glamorous neighbor, was actually the oldest settlement on the whole coast. That was enough for me. We parked in a gravel lot that smelled of hot dust and lemon leaves and walked into a town that felt like it had forgotten to perform for anyone.

There’s something in Scala’s stillness that I think comes from its age. People fled here from Roman-era coastal raids, up into these folds of hillside, and you can feel that logic in the way the town is built: tucked, watchful, facing outward toward Ravello across the ravine like it’s still keeping an eye on things. For centuries it rivaled Amalfi as a seat of bishops, which is hard to square with how sleepy it feels today, until you walk into the Duomo di San Lorenzo and climb down into the 12th-century crypt. I stood in that cool, low-ceilinged room longer than I meant to. Lia had to come get me.

A local we got talking to outside a bar mentioned, almost in passing, that Ignatius of Loyola is said to have written part of the Spiritual Exercises somewhere around here in the 1500s. I don’t know how much of that is documented fact and how much is the kind of story a town tells about itself, but standing in that hush, I believed it easily. We wandered down into Minuta, the little hamlet within Scala’s borders, past one of the oldest churches on the coast, its stone worn soft at the edges from centuries of hands and weather.

What I loved most, though, was that Scala didn’t feel like a place to look at so much as a place to leave from. Trails drop down from town into the Valle delle Ferriere reserve, all ferns and waterfalls in a gorge that stays cool even in August, and others climb the other way, up toward the ridge that separates this coast from Cilento. We only did a short stretch of one before the light started going gold and we turned back for a plate of scialatielli somewhere with a view we hadn’t earned but weren’t going to argue with.

When to go: Aim for spring or autumn, when the hiking trails linking Scala to Ravello and Amalfi are cool enough to actually enjoy, rather than something to survive.