The beauty of Atrani, now ruined by Netflix

Some time in the Noughties I sat next to a guy at work who told me he’d just had a holiday in a village on the outskirts of Amalfi. The village was called Atrani – quite unknown then, but now swooned over as the setting for the ominous but dreamy black-and-white Netflix adaptation Ripley. That year, I had no plans for the summer and decided to replicate his trip, with my two daughters, aged 13 and 10. There was no hotel in the village, rather a series of rooms rented out by a lawyer called Filippo. I contacted him to book and he replied: ‘I’m sure it will be fine, just turn up.’ This didn’t over-fill me with confidence but I went ahead. We flew into in Naples late one evening and got to the hotel I’d found in the Rough Guide. Rough didn’t quite cover it – our room was tiny and windowless and breakfast was a malfunctioning vending machine in the lobby. 

Ripley is set several years earlier but the bus he catches from Naples to Atrani is not vastly different from the one we took, and the hair-raising driving and views from the road exactly the same.