Amalfi: This blessed plot

This is not an article about hedonism. Oh, no. The Amalfi coast may be the favoured historical playground of the bad and the beautiful — from Tiberius to Sophia Loren and Gwyneth Paltrow — but my theme is one of culture. What is it about this rocky stretch of southwest Italy that has drawn such disparate artistes as Wagner, D.H. Lawrence, Turner, John Steinbeck and Gore Vidal? Oh, heck, you win. Let’s have some hedonism first.

I am sitting, bubbling nicely, in a Jacuzzi that, through the picture window beside it, looks over the town as it runs down to the sea. The Jacuzzi, in my marbled bathroom in Positano’s Le Sirenuse hotel, comes with an underwater HD screen and a bottle of champagne, or rather the room does — perhaps to console one for having to remortage the house to pay the bill.

It is quite a Jacuzzi. Around me are the emerald hills of Positano, its brightly coloured little houses and shops full of Bulgari trinkets, gleaming like gems set in the silver of the waves below. In the distance, a sinuous island rises from the water resembling a woman with three breasts. As Aristotle Onassis once remarked, ‘If you take a woman to the Amalfi coast and fail to seduce her, you are not a man at all.’

But what’s a girl like me doing in a Jacuzzi like this? Researching the cultural legacy of the coast. Or that’s my excuse. Forget five-star hotels, homemade tagliolini and all those bella figuras — including Jackie Kennedy, Paul Newman, Madonna and Miss Loren (who has a villa here) — who have walked the cobbled streets. What interests me is why men of genius were drawn here like iron filings to a magnet. It can’t have been Jacuzzis.