I. Vernacular architecture and the construction of a rural landscape
A cursory look at the houses with vaulted roofs, their structures, building materials and the techniques employed to adapt them to a changing rural landscape reveals the local inhabitants' talent for choosing the most apt dwelling pattern. This gift is the result of a legacy of time-honoured practices and skills which medieval merchant-farmers developed with great sensibility and ingenious shrewdness along with new cultures which were to indelibly forge and denote the landscape as they were passed down from father to son. Houses with vaulted roofs, industrious "lime-kilns" similar to smelting furnaces, spectacular successions of terraces shored up only and solely by dry-stone walls, magnificent tiered footpaths running parallel to the coast or climbing up the mountain slopes, extraordinary canals carrying water from the mountain springs to the coast are indeed a very original combination which constitutes that unicum that the Amalfi Coast continues being to this day.

II. Major architectural episodes
Religious architecture with its train of renovation works, extensions and new works superimposed on older buildings is like a palimpsest of periods, meetings, events and influences that imperceptibly fade out one into the other. The churches of the Amalfi Coast, be they early Christian basilicas or vestiges of Romanic spirituality, chapels of nobility or heavily decorated baroque structures, illustrate a fully local version of the history of art. But it is civil architecture that primarily marks the triumph of that very special ability of mediating, assimilating and re-elaborating suggestions from different and at times remote worlds: the "palazzi" of the nobility in Amalfi, Scala, Ravello are refined jewels made of intertwined arches and slender pensile columns, ornate portals and terraces, inner courtyards and external stairways decorated with elements reminiscent of an Arabic style that is not, however, of Arabic taste and that here and only here finds its "raison d'être".

III. Votive aedicules
Countless votive aedicules found especially in the towns along the seashore reveal a simple, guileless but deep sentiment half way between religion and superstition. They can be found on street corners or on the walls, in alleys and along roads and are the signs of a faith that goes beyond religious worship and liturgy, a faith that finds, recognizes, and brings the divine into everyday life in hopes of its comfort and protection. Frescoed on walls or painted on ceramic tiles or wood templates in ancient or recent times, they mark the presence and irruption of the sacred into the sphere of everyday life. Although they are moving expressions of popular piety, they are real and proper works of art and the fact that they are motivated by deep anthropological needs in no way diminishes the value of these small masterpieces.