From The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, October

Worse things happen…

I remind myself as it starts raining. It wasn’t water that fell from the sky 1,929 years ago, after all, but burning lungfuls of volcanic dust.

Having swallowed the slab-faced suburbs on the lower slopes of Vesuvius, the grey cloud rolled on down into Pompeii and drove the panicking crowd across the forum into the Temple of Apollo. Some found shelter, but most were caught in the open.

The Amalfi coast in a Bentley

Nick Foulkes and his travelling companion, the Count, dawdle down to the Amalfi coast

• The perfect Italian lake

Naples is so naughty

A nest of human caterpillars or a place where dilettantes never grow tired? Take your pick, says Frederic Raphael

• The Amalfi Coast for a family

• Vesuvius: Italy's secret recipe

• Italy's great unknown town

Amalfi by public transport

Walter Sherman wants to visit the Amalfi coast, but can he get around easily without a car?

• How to book Italian rail tickets

• The charm of Ravello

• The hip Italian hotel collection

Related Internet Links

• More articles in our Italy travel section

Related Links

• 21 weekend breaks for September

And one day, everyone knows, Vesuvius will once again void its belly, hurl away its cap of cloud and bathe the earth in fire. Today, as I say, it’s just rain that lashes down on us and we must try to be thankful.

In truth, there is much to be thankful for. In late October – with the clocks going back and autumn filching the evening light – the crowds have thinned, the sunbeds have been stacked and, briefly, before the shutters come down for winter, southern Italy once again offers the possibility of tranquillity.

Even on Capri, the streets paved with credit cards fall suddenly silent when the last tour boat heads back to Naples or Sorrento. Hotel clerks become obsequious emperors of empty marble halls. Waiters with tables to fill are heartily welcoming instead of haughtily aloof. It would be stretching the point to suggest that driving becomes a pleasure, but at least (once you escape Naples) the jams are measured in minutes rather than hours.

Naples itself is best left to the Neapolitans, to the stray dogs that haunt its scruffy squares and the pent-up wrath of Vesuvius. The direction to head is south. Everything you’ve ever heard about the Amalfi Coast is, more or less, true. The drive between Amalfi and Sorrento is one of the scenic experiences of a lifetime: the tightly packed little towns, in which stairs take the place of streets, make a mockery of Le Corbusier’s claim to be the inventor of vertical living.

Anywhere along the precipitous, coiling mantel shelf that passes for a road, you could point your camera and catch one of the loveliest views in Europe. People pay good money to sit in coaches just to be driven along it, torn between vertigo and awe. In places, it is so absurdly beautiful that it’s difficult not to laugh.

If anything wipes the smile from your face, it’s the prices. Anywhere in the area of Amalfi or Ravello, 10 minutes in a taxi will knock a £20 hole in your pocket. In Ravello’s Piazza Duomo, two small beers and two lemon sodas rack up £15. Budget travellers will need to acquaint themselves with the frequent local bus services or rediscover the use of their legs. (The descent on foot from Ravello to Minori, Atrani or Amalfi takes about an hour and is beyond the scope of travel writers’ clichés to describe – though ‘breathtaking’ will certainly do for the climb back up.)

Ravello is a star in any company, and it works on the brain like mescaline. Whether they seek it or not, artists, writers and musicians seldom seem able here to quieten their imaginations or to toe the prevailing moral line. In the narrow Via San Francesco, a few doors down from the convent of the same name, is the house in which DH Lawrence penned Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Wagner famously conceived the second act of Parsifal – a macabre parable of good and evil – in the gardens of the Villa Rufolo.

Just round the corner, André Gide wrote his challenge to sexual and social conformity, The Immoralist – a work that Gide himself, as if in thrall to the volcanic landscape, offered as ‘a fruit filled with bitter ashes’. EM Forster and Lytton Strachey also felt Ravello’s pull. So, later, did Gore Vidal and other champions of sexual liberty. Even Greta Garbo, with an uncharacteristic display of openness, chose it for her affair with the conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Times recommends

• Travel advice: what to do if your flight is disrupted
• Top 10 unmissable events in 2010
• Seven spa breaks for January