Via Positanesi d’America: The Street That Tells the True Story of Positano

Via Positanesi d’America: The Street That Tells the True Story of Positano

There is a version of Positano that exists in travel media — hotel terraces above the sea, ceramic staircases, bougainvillea at the exact angle that photographs best in afternoon light — that is real. I’ve photographed it many times and I understand its pull completely. It’s one of the most visually consistent places I’ve worked in, which is either a compliment or an observation about how thoroughly the tourist economy has shaped the available surfaces.

Via Positanesi d’America is not shaped for tourism. It’s a steep staircase street connecting the upper village to the lower harbour, and it carries the name of the people who left Positano in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because the fishing was unreliable, the land was nearly impossible to cultivate, and there was no road to the outside world until 1932. They went to New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. Some came back eventually. Some sent money. Some did neither. The street remembers all of them.

What the Name Actually Records

Mass emigration from Positano followed the same pattern as emigration from across the Mezzogiorno: young men first, then families, then the remittance economy that slowly transformed the village over decades. The houses that now operate as boutique hotels at €400 a night were in many cases built or repaired with money sent from addresses in Brooklyn and the Ironbound district of Newark. The history and the current luxury version of Positano exist in the same buildings simultaneously. This is not a contradiction the village resolves — it simply contains it.

Walking Via Positanesi d’America doesn’t change any of this. It adds a layer: the specific weight of a name on a street sign, and what that name was put there to record about the people who didn’t get to stay.

The Street as a Photography Subject

The walls along this staircase are old and irregular — construction from before planning considerations, built for use rather than appearance. You can read the repairs and additions and variations in stone that accumulate over several centuries of maintenance. The light in this street at midday is almost entirely indirect, reflected from pale walls and filtered through the gap of sky above. This makes it excellent for photography precisely when the open beach and squares are washed out by direct overhead sun. The colours in the shade are more saturated than you’d expect: the paint, the climbing plants, the blue slot of sea visible at the bottom of the descent through the gap where the staircase ends and the harbour begins.

It’s a five-minute walk. I’ve spent 45 minutes on it on multiple visits, which is the correct amount of time.

Finding It

From the main village square, descend toward the harbour along any of the staircase routes. Via Positanesi d’America branches off one of these descending paths — marked by a street sign that is easy to miss if you’re looking at the view rather than the walls. The bottom connects to the harbour area. There are no cafés on it, no ceramic shops, no information boards. Just the staircase, the walls, and the name that carries everything it carries.