The neoclassical-style Villa Astor, in Sorrento.

Villa Astor’s parlor, adorned with bas-relief frescoes, Empire-style furniture, and an antique marble sculpture of Cybele.

The view from Villa Torre di Capo Vettica, an early-20th-century house in Amalfi.

Giuseppe Ducrot’s neo-Baroque fountain at Positano’s Le Sirenuse hotel.

Inside Villa Templa Mare, in Ravello, a house characterized by its Islamic-style mosaic floor.

An outside view of Villa Cimbrone, a hotel in Ravello.

The kitchen in Villa Torre di Capo Vettica, decorated with ceramic floors by the American designer Ernestine Virden-Cannon.

Gothic and Arabic styles intersect in Villa Cimbrone.

Seaside Splendors

A new book spotlights the Amalfi Coast’s most picturesque homes

In 1953, John Steinbeck wrote a story called “Positano” for Harper’s Bazaar. “Positano bites deep,” he mused. “It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.” His evocation of the place would spur an onslaught of high-profile tourists—Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor, Rudolf Nureyev, and Liza Minnelli among them—who showed up at the seafarers’ village in hats from Bergdorf Goodman, à la mode cotton dresses, and bikinis.

Though celebrities brought the Amalfi Coast into our collective modern consciousness, they weren’t the first people to fall for the area’s dramatic cliffs and impossibly blue sea. In the first century A.D., to escape assassination attempts in Rome, Emperor Tiberius began the construction of Villa Jovis, a sprawling residence atop one of the peaks of Capri. Many other prominent Romans followed suit.