The Sentiero delle 13 Chiese in Tramonti
Most people who visit the Amalfi Coast see the same things—the sea from the road, the cliffs from the ferry, the towns in the hour or two between coach stops. It's beautiful, of course, but it’s also, in its own way, a performance, a front row, a postcard—Tramonti is the backstage.
Set into the mountains above Maiori, Tramonti is not one village but thirteen, yes thirteen, autonomous hamlets, each with its own church, its own piazza, its own particular personality, arranged in a loose ring around the Colle Santa Maria. The name comes from intra montes— between the mountains, which tells you everything about what to expect—not sea views, not tourist menus, not a gelato queue. Instead you find chestnut forests, century-old vines, lemon terraces, stone fountains, and a silence that the Coast often forgets.
The Sentiero delle 13 Chiese—officially CAI 310—is the trail that ties all of this together. A 15.2 km circular route rated T (Turistico, accessible to regular walkers), it threads through eleven of Tramonti's thirteen hamlets, rising from 140 metres to a high point of 490 metres and returning to where it started. The CAI estimates 6h 30 each way, which is to say it is a full day—an unhurried and genuinely rewarding full day.
This is one of the best Amalfi Coast trekking routes you've probably never heard of, which is, frankly, part of the appeal.
The trail is a loop, which means you can technically begin anywhere. But if you're arriving by public transport—SITA bus, line Maiori–Tramonti—Pucara is where you want to start. It sits at around kilometre 4 of the Maiori–Chiunzi road, there's a bus stop on Via Chiunzi, and there's parking nearby if you're driving. Pucara is also, for anyone paying attention to the story of this place, the right place to begin.
At the top of a long stone staircase, just above the lemon groves that announce you've arrived, stands the Conservatorio di San Giuseppe e Teresa. Founded in 1662, this monastery-turned-ruin is where the Liquore Concerto was born—a dark, dense digestif made by macerating fifteen different herbs—including anise, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, red sandalwood—for forty days, then finishing with a syrup of roasted barley and espresso. The recipe was kept by the nuns. The monastery no longer operates, and the building is in ruins, but the liqueur is still made in Tramonti, and knowing its origin gives the first few steps of this walk a pleasingly peculiar weight.
A few metres further along, the Chiesa di Sant'Erasmo, built in 1533, marks the official start of the route. From here, the path winds north through the Vallone Sant'Antonio.
The lower section of the circuit is where the landscape reveals itself clearly. The path follows the Reginna Minor river, which has its source right here in Tramonti, and the terraced hillsides along the water are full of lemon cultivation—this is not accidental. As a local guide explains, lemon groves need a great amount of water, which is why they concentrate along the valley floor, where the river keeps things reliably damp and alive.
The first hamlet you reach after Pucara is Novella (260 m), where the Chiesa di San Bartolomeo Apostolo dates to the 16th century. Then comes Gete (350 m), and here the trail rewards the curious. Gete is where the Tintore grape grows. This is not a minor detail. The Tintore is one of the rarest and most extraordinary native vines in southern Italy, named after the density of the pigment in its flesh, and it survives here precisely because the soils of Tramonti are volcanic and sandy, properties that proved inhospitable to phylloxera, the parasite that devastated virtually every other European vineyard between the 19th and early 20th centuries. The vines here were never grafted onto American rootstock and for this reason are called a piede franco. They are pre-phylloxera survivors, some of them more than three centuries old, trained on the traditional pergola tramontana, a canopy of chestnut poles that turns the vineyards into something closer to cathedrals.
The wine produced from the Tintore is just as remarkable as the plant—full-bodied, dark, with notes of blackberry, graphite, wild fennel and ash, and a mineral saltiness that is the direct fingerprint of the volcanic terrain. Wineries such as Tenuta San Francesco, Reale and Monte di Grazia are among those keeping this tradition alive.
Also in Gete—the Cappella Rupestre, a rock-cut chapel dating to the 8th century, its vaulted interior visible through large glass panels even when the door is locked. It is a startling thing to find on a hillside—a small, dark room carved directly into the stone, with groined vaults and a stillness that feels unreal.
From Gete the path passes through the hamlet of Ponte (350 m), the smallest of Tramonti's thirteen, before connecting to Campinola (380 m).
Campinola is worth a pause. The Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista houses an 18th-century organ of great beauty, and if you have arranged it in advance, the hamlet also gives access to the Giardino Segreto dell'Anima (the Secret Garden of the Soul).
Set on an old abandoned vineyard, the garden covers around 3,000 square metres of terraced land and holds 25 varieties of citrus, roughly 300 types of rose, medicinal herbs and botanical rarities. The place is managed by the Telese-De Marco family, and a visit here becomes something other than a garden tour—it's a conversation about what it means to curate a piece of land with patience over decades, to let beauty develop at its own pace. For anyone walking the 13 Chiese circuit, it is precisely the kind of stop that turns a good hike into a memorable one.
From Campinola the trail climbs towards Corsano (390 m) and then up to the Colle Santa Maria—the highest and most dramatic point of the walk, at around 517 metres. This is where the Castello di Santa Maria La Nova once stood, built in 1458 with sixteen towers to defend the inland territory of the Duchy of Amalfi against raids from the Agro Nocerino. The castle is long gone, replaced by the communal cemetery, which sits here with extraordinary views over the whole valley. From this point, you can see the peaks that frame the Parco dei Monti Lattari—Monte Cerreto at 1,316 metres (the second highest in the range), Monte Finestra with its famous rock window, and the summit of Monte dell'Avvocata hovering over Maiori below—it is one of those views that requires a moment of honest silence.
Descending from the Colle, the trail passes through Capitignano (434 m), where the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Neve was rebuilt in the late 16th century on the ruins of a church from 1231, before continuing to the hamlet of Pietre (406 m) and then to Frescale, where the CAI 313 branches off towards higher ground.
The next stop is Figlino (360 m), and it is one of the strangest and most touching on the entire route. The hamlet's name derives from figlini—illegitimate children. Between the 8th and 9th centuries, this was where newborns who could not be claimed were brought, housed in a hospital-foundling home that gave the place its identity. The Chiesa di San Pietro, built between the late 16th and early 17th centuries, carries that history with unexpected grace— its interior floor, laid in the 1700s with hand-painted Capodimonte ceramics depicting lemons and peacocks, is one of the most quietly extraordinary things you will see on any Amalfi Coast trekking route. Symbols of fertility and eternity, in a hamlet named for children who had neither family nor inheritance—worth sitting with.
From Figlino the trail reaches the two parts of Paterno — first Sant'Arcangelo (270 m), home to the Chiesa dell'Ascensione, built entirely in stone and dating to the 10th century, one of the oldest churches in Tramonti, and then Sant'Elia (235 m), where the trail also intersects with the CAI 310c, the Sentiero delle Formichelle, which descends to Maiori if you want to extend the day towards the coast. At the Sorgente Acqua della Madonna, between the two Paterno churches, there is a spring of fresh water—a good place to refill and recalibrate.
The final stretch brings you back through the hamlet of Ferriera (147 m), which takes its name from the iron-working mills that once operated here, powered by the Reginna Major river. By the medieval period, this valley was among the earliest proto-industrial districts in southern Italy. The river turned millstones and hammers that produced iron goods, nails and tools for the Republic of Amalfi, before the same buildings were later converted to produce paper. The bambagina, Amalfi's famous cotton-rag paper, was made in these valley workshops, and the ruins of the old mill still stand beside the water.
From Ferriera it's a short walk back to Pucara. The loop is closed. The churches, or at least the eleven you've passed through, have been visited. The vines, the groves, the medieval floors and the volcanic soils have all made their case.
Let’s be honest, this trail has little to do with lemons specifically. There are lemon groves in the lower section, yes, and the Capodimonte floor in Figlino shows them rendered in ceramic, but the 13 Chiese is not a lemon walk. It is, however, deeply and relentlessly about the culture that made lemon growing possible.
The terraced hillsides built by hand, the relationship between mountain and coast, the way that centuries of patient cultivation shaped a landscape that is still, remarkably, productive and alive. The volcanic soils that protected the Tintore vine are the same soils that make lemon groves viable here. The river that powered the medieval paper mills is the same river that irrigates the citrus terraces below. Everything connects, as it tends to in places where people have been taking good care for a very long time.
That kind of attention is what Lemon Appeal is drawn to. Not the product in isolation, but the whole system of knowledge, landscape and tradition that made it possible. Walking the Trail of the 13 Churches is how you begin to understand that system from the inside.
Start/End: Pucara (hamlet of Tramonti)
Distance: 15.2 km (circular)
Duration: approximately 6h 30—allow a full day
Difficulty: T (Turistico—suitable for regular walkers; no technical terrain)
Altitude range: 140–490 m (517 m at Colle Santa Maria)
Total elevation gain/loss: 614 m each way
Water: Fountains in almost every hamlet along the route—Pucara, Novella, Torina, Gete, Ponte, Campinola, Corsano, Capitignano, Pietre, Figlino, and the Acqua della Madonna spring near Paterno
GPX/KML files: available at caimontilattari.it
Shortcut: The CAI 310a variant cuts through the centre of the loop via Polvica, roughly halving the distance if a full day isn't on the cards.
Getting there: SITA bus, line Maiori–Tramonti, to the Pucara stop on Via Chiunzi. By car: drive to Pucara; parking available near the bus stop.
Best seasons: Spring (March–May) for lemon blossom and wildflowers; autumn (October–November) for the Tintore harvest, chestnut season and golden light in the forests. Weekdays—always, for the quiet.
Note: Most churches are locked outside of religious services. Horizontally marked signage (red and white CAI markers) is good throughout, but vertical signs are sparse. Download the GPX before you go and check the CAI Monti Lattari website for any trail updates—a 2020 route modification means some older maps may be slightly out of date.
