Behind the Photo: The Positano Hills

There's a version of this photograph that existed in my head for over thirty years before I ever pressed the shutter. Long before I owned a decent camera, long before I knew what an aperture even was. What you're looking at isn't just a picture of a town built into a cliff. It's the end of a very long story that started when I was a little kid in Colorado with a head full of dreams I didn't know how to reach yet.

Photo Credit: Picryl

I was about nine years old when I first learned about Positano, Italy. It was in the encyclopedia in my grandparents house - a faded color image from the late 1800’s. It's a little ironic, actually, because that was around the same time I fell in love with photography. Two obsessions born in the same season of my life, and it took me thirty years to finally bring them together in one frame. There was just something about this place that captivated me in a way nothing else did.

I didn't really understand why at the time, and honestly, I'm not sure I fully understand it now. Maybe it was the fact that this beautiful city was built straight up the side of a mountain, and yet it somehow still belonged to the ocean at the same time. Two landscapes that don't usually share the same postcard. Tall, dramatic mountains right next to deep blue water. It felt like the town was defying some unspoken rule of geography, like nobody told Positano it wasn't supposed to exist that way.

I grew up in a small town in Colorado, so mountains were nothing new to me. They were just the wallpaper of everyday life, something you saw so often you almost stopped seeing them. But I had never seen anything like the ornate architecture of Positano. The bright, sun-baked colors of the buildings stacked on top of each other. The way it all sat against that impossibly blue background of sky and sea. To a kid who only knew rock, pine trees, and long winters, Positano looked like something out of a storybook - not a real place. A place someone had invented and drawn just a little too beautifully to be true.

I used to flip through whatever pictures of it I could find and just sit with them. I would stare at the little boats in the harbor, the lemon trees climbing up the hillsides, the laundry hanging between buildings, and try to imagine what it would actually feel like to stand there in person. To hear it. To smell it. I had no idea, at nine years old, that this quiet fascination would follow me all the way into adulthood.

Then, in 2003, a movie called Under the Tuscan Sun came out. A good portion of that movie is not only set in Positano, but also in my second favorite region of Italy, Tuscany. I was in college. I remember watching it and feeling this strange, specific ache, almost like homesickness for a place I had never actually been. It's a hard feeling to explain unless you've felt it yourself. It's safe to say that my infatuation with this city multiplied tenfold after that movie, and it just kept growing over the next twenty years. It wasn't a loud kind of obsession. It was quieter than that. It sat in the background of my life through high school, through college, through jobs and moves and everything else, patiently waiting its turn.

It was then that Positano officially became a fixture on my bucket list, but if I'm honest, it felt less like a bucket list item and more like a piece of unfinished business with myself. I wasn't raised in the most affluent of families. Travel like this wasn't really something we did much of growing up, and for a long time I genuinely never thought I'd get the chance to go to Italy, let alone stand in the one city I had been dreaming about since childhood. It felt like the kind of dream you learn to hold loosely, almost on purpose, because holding it too tightly makes the idea of it never happening hurt a little more.

But my husband, daughter and I finally decided to take the plunge for my 40th birthday. Turning 40 has a way of shifting your priorities. You start asking yourself what you're actually waiting for. The trip got delayed about six months or so, life has a way of doing that to even the best laid plans, but we finally made it happen during spring break of 2024. And if anything, the wait only made it sweeter. By the time we boarded that plane, I had been waiting so long that the excitement almost didn't feel real yet.

We arrived in Positano at night. The road in winds through tunnels underneath the mountains, back and forth, and back and forth again, switchback after switchback, until I was thoroughly carsick and completely drained from a full day of travel. I remember sitting in the dark with my eyes closed, more exhausted than I had been in a long time, but underneath all of that exhaustion there was this quiet, electric certainty humming away. I knew that when I woke up in the morning, I was finally going to see a view I had carried around in my head for thirty years. I remember smiling to myself in the dark car, half sick to my stomach and half unbelievably happy at the same time. It's a strange but real and welcomed combination.

Safe to say, I didn't sleep much that night. Pure excitement kept me up, the kind that has nothing to do with anxiety and everything to do with anticipation. When daybreak finally came, around 4:50 in the morning, I was already wide awake. We had a small balcony at our rental for the trip. I got up quietly so I wouldn't wake anyone else, walked outside, and sat down alone.

And I cried.

Not a quiet, polite little tear either. I was a drenched mess - in complete shock, sitting there taking it all in. The view in front of me wasn't just what I had imagined for three decades. It was more. It was better. Somehow, after all those years of researching, daydreaming, and building this place up in my mind through pictures and movies and stories, the real thing still managed to outdo every version I had ever created of it. I really couldn't believe it.

Here I was, in a place I had dreamed about and researched and fantasized over for most of my life, finally seeing it with my own two eyes instead of through a screen or the pages of a book. The light was just starting to touch the tops of the cliffs, the water was that deep, impossible blue I had seen in every photo but never quite believed, and the whole town was still half asleep around me.

That morning, sitting on that balcony, is where this photograph comes from.

We planned the trip during the off season, right in the middle of Easter week, and looking back, I think that ended up being one of the best decisions we made without even fully realizing it at the time. The town wasn't packed with tourists the way I imagine it gets in the peak of summer. Instead, it was just alive with locals living their daily lives. Shopkeepers sweeping their front steps. Fishermen bringing in the morning catch. Grandmothers calling out to each other from opposite balconies. Everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) so kind and sweet to us the entire time we were there.

Here's a little trick about Italy (and nearly any country you visit): if you make even a small attempt to speak their language, embrace their culture, truly care and learn, the locals are SO thankful for it. It doesn't have to be perfect. It really doesn't even have to be good. We tried throughout the entire trip, stumbling over, mixing up our words, laughing at ourselves more than once, and the community really embraced us for the effort.

We ate things we loved - and ate every bite. We walked stairs that felt endless, past bougainvillea spilling over walls and the smell of lemons everywhere, actual lemons, growing right there on the trees along the paths. We got wonderfully lost more than once and never really minded. Every wrong turn seemed to lead to another view, another quiet corner of the town that felt like it existed just for us in that moment.

I will never forget it. I feel like this trip was meant for me, like Positano had been waiting patiently for the right moment for over thirty years, and it finally arrived exactly when I needed it most. I know, without question, that I left a piece of my heart in that city. It's tucked somewhere between the lemon trees and the stairs and the sound of the water hitting the rocks below. I can't wait to go back.

This photograph is our final morning. It's not just a picture of a town on a cliff by the sea. It's thirty years of wanting. It's the nine year old little boy, falling in love with a place he had never seen. It's a movie that fanned a flame that never really went out. It's a 40th birthday that finally made an old dream real. Every time I look at it, I don't just see Positano. I see the whole story that led me there.

I encourage everyone to go experience the Amalfi Coast for themselves, if they ever get the chance.

But even more than that, I encourage everyone to work hard to fulfill their own travel dreams, whatever those might be. It doesn't just change your perspective. It gives you a deeper appreciation, both for your own dreams and for the cultures that exist all over the world, cultures that are so willing to welcome you in if you let them. And if you come with an open heart, a kind one, one that truly shows admiration for the place and the people you're stepping into, they will love you right back. I promise you that.