Rome to Amalfi Coast - April 2026
Speargun seafood, pizza on a volcano, a ghost town in Cilento, and the Amalfi Coast with almost nobody on it — the first ARI tour of 2026 delivered on every count.
Some tours you remember for the roads. Some for the food. The best ones you can't really separate the two, and everything else in between just adds to the experience. The April run of the Rome to Amalfi route was one of those. We left Rome on a warm spring morning with the kind of light that makes southern Italy look almost unfair, and pointed the bikes south.
Lunch on day one set the standard immediately. We sat down on the coast and the restaurant owner had been out that morning with a spear gun. What arrived at the table was not something you order from a menu — it was whatever the sea had given up a few hours earlier, simply cooked and completely extraordinary. That's the thing about this part of Italy. It ambushes you with food before you've even had time to get hungry.
After a light afternoon drizzle that cleared the air and made the roads smell incredible, we climbed Vesuvius. The hotel that night was a proper villa sitting right up on the volcano — the kind of place that makes you wonder how it even exists, and why you'd ever want to sleep anywhere else. And then, because we were on an active volcano and it would have been criminal not to, we went for pizza. Neapolitan pizza, on Vesuvius. Some things are simply not up for discussion.
The Amalfi Coast on a weekend is a real ride, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't done it properly. The road is narrow, relentless, and completely spectacular, and the group handled it brilliantly — confident, reading the traffic, finding the rhythm that the coast demands of you. We also made it to our secret swim spot, which sees almost none of the tourist traffic: clear spring water, just warm enough, and the kind of quiet that's genuinely hard to find on one of the most visited stretches of coastline in Europe.
The following day we left the coast and pushed into Cilento, which is always the part of this route that surprises people most. They come for Amalfi and Cilento stays with them just as long, sometimes longer. Mountain roads through olive groves, old villages gripping hillsides, the occasional wild boar ready to escape at the first sight of a bike.
After a very generous traditional lunch in the mountains — where we ended up sharing the room with another ride-out group who'd clearly had the same idea about where to eat — we rode to Roscigno Vecchio, an abandoned town that was evacuated in the early 1900s due to landslides and left almost entirely intact ever since. Walking through it is a strange, quietly unsettling experience. The buildings are still standing and slowly being devoured by the vegetation, the old layout of the town is all there, and the only permanent resident left is an old man and his animals who have refused to leave for decades. We didn't stay long, but surely the place will sits in your head for a while after you leave. We ended the day in Castellabate at sunset — a small hilltop town that manages to be genuinely beautiful without making any effort about it whatsoever.
Day five brought one of the unexpected highlights of the whole tour. On the way from Castellabate towards Naples we stopped at a buffalo mozzarella farm, and I have to say this was something else entirely. The buffalos here are not exactly living a hard life. They roam freely in their compound, they get regular spa treatment — jets of water, automated brushes, the full works — and when they feel like being milked, they queue up at the automatic milking machine themselves. Nobody herds them. Nobody tells them when. They just decide, walk over, and get on with it. I've seen a lot of things on these tours, but watching a two-tonne buffalo calmly and independently manage its own dairy schedule is genuinely something. The mozzarella we ate straight after was, predictably, extraordinary.
The final riding day also brought the climb back over the mountains above Amalfi — steep, technical, and almost completely ignored by tourists who stick to the coast road below. The views up there are something else: Amalfi coast on one side, Vesuvius and the full sweep of the Bay of Naples on the other, the road all to yourself. Lunch was at the top of the mountain, where a christening celebration took over the establishment with local musicians.
Then down into Naples for the last night. Pizza on the seafront, a long walk along the waterfront afterwards, the city doing exactly what Naples does — loud, warm, completely and unapologetically itself. The best possible way to end it.
It was a strong start to the season. The roads delivered, the food delivered, and the group made it what it was. That last part matters more than people tend to realise when they're booking.
