The Most Beautiful Places in Salerno
6 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Salerno are Positano, Certosa di Padula and Paestum. The list covers 6 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The province of Salerno holds two of southern Italy's great landscapes side by side. To the north, the Lattari Mountains drop almost straight into the Tyrrhenian Sea, and the towns of the Amalfi Coast cling to terraces of lemon groves and vineyards cut into limestone. To the south, the Cilento opens into wide plains, river valleys and quieter shores where Greek colonists, Lucanians and Romans left their marks. Few corners of Italy fold so much history into such a compact stretch of coast and hinterland.
Positano is the coast's vertical village, its pastel houses stacked down a ravine to a pebble beach. In Amalfi, a broad flight of steps rises to the cathedral of Sant'Andrea, with a striped Arab-Norman facade and bronze doors cast in Constantinople. Above the sea at Ravello, Villa Cimbrone ends in the Terrace of Infinity, a balustrade of marble busts hanging over the gulf. Between Amalfi and Positano, the Fiordo di Furore is a narrow gorge where a stream meets the sea beneath a single arched road bridge, with a handful of old fishermen's houses tucked into its walls.
Inland and to the south, the scale changes. Paestum keeps three Doric temples from the Greek city of Poseidonia, among the best preserved anywhere, standing in open fields near the shore. The Certosa di Padula, founded in the fourteenth century and rebuilt in Baroque style, is one of the largest Carthusian monasteries in Europe, its great cloister alone the size of a town square.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Positano | Most beautiful village | |
| 2 | Certosa di Padula | Carthusian monastery | ✓ |
| 3 | Paestum | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 4 | Amalfi Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 5 | Villa Cimbrone | Historic garden | |
| 6 | Fiordo di Furore | Fjord |
01 Positano
Italy · 25 km from Salerno40.628° N 14.482° E
Image by floydbarbel from Pixabay Positano is a village that falls down a mountain into the sea.
Did you know? A chain of medieval watchtowers, including the 13th-century Torre della Sponda, guarded Positano's coves against Saracen raids.
02 Certosa di Padula
Italy · 36.1 km from Potenza40.337° N 15.652° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by gvizzari0 from Pixabay The Certosa di San Lorenzo at Padula, in the Vallo di Diano of southern Campania, is the largest charterhouse in Italy and one of the grandest in Europe: about 51,500 square metres of cloisters, gardens, courtyards and some 320 rooms, spread out at the foot of the hill town of Padula.
Did you know? The church's wooden choir stalls, carved in the early 1500s, are inlaid with saints, landscapes and architectural scenes, including 36 New Testament episodes.
03 Paestum
Italy · 34.9 km from Salerno40.423° N 15.006° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SCAPIN from Pixabay Paestum, on the plain south of Salerno, has three Greek temples in the Doric order that are among the best preserved anywhere, standing in open fields inside an almost complete ring of ancient walls.
Did you know? The Tomb of the Diver, found on 3 June 1968, is the only Greek painting with figures from the Archaic or Classical era known to survive complete.
04 Amalfi Cathedral
Duomo di Amalfi
Italy · 15 km from Salerno40.634° N 14.603° E
Luca Aless · CC BY-SA 3.0 At the head of the Piazza del Duomo in Amalfi, a facade of striped stone and marble, glittering mosaics and pointed arches fills the end of the piazza.
Did you know? The bell tower's top is a central drum ringed by four smaller turrets, and building it took more than a century from 1180.
05 Villa Cimbrone
Italy · 14.1 km from Salerno40.643° N 14.610° E
Image by luckysilver1 from Pixabay High on the ridge of Ravello, at the end of a footpath out of the town, the gardens of Villa Cimbrone end at a balustrade that seems to hang in mid-air.
Did you know? Lord Grimthorpe died in London in 1917, and his body was brought back to Ravello to be buried in his garden.
06 Fiordo di Furore
Italy · 19.7 km from Salerno40.614° N 14.554° E
Ugeorge · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Fiordo di Furore is a narrow cleft in the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, so deep and so tight that the sea seems to run straight into the mountain.
Did you know? A calcara, a traditional lime kiln once used to produce lime for local building, also survives in the fjord.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Salerno?
- On our list, Positano ranks first, followed by Certosa di Padula and Paestum.
- Is the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno?
- Yes. The Amalfi Coast, including Positano, Amalfi and Ravello, lies in the province of Salerno, on the southern side of the Sorrento Peninsula. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.
- How old are the temples of Paestum?
- The three Doric temples at Paestum were built by Greek colonists between roughly the mid-sixth and mid-fifth centuries BC. The so-called Basilica, dedicated to Hera, is the oldest of them.
- Why is the Fiordo di Furore called a fjord?
- It is not a glacial fjord but a deep gorge carved by the Schiato stream where it reaches the sea. Its steep walls and narrow inlet simply recall the shape of a Nordic fjord.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Salerno?
- In our collection, the places in Salerno are most often fjords (1), historic gardens (1), cathedrals (1) and Carthusian monasteries (1).
- How many places are on this list in Salerno?
- The list covers 6 places.