Ripley & the Amalfi Coast: Filming Locations to Visit

Steven Zaillian spent four years developing Ripley before a single frame was shot in Italy. When Netflix’s eight-episode adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel arrived in April 2024 — filmed in black and white, directed and written entirely by Zaillian, with Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley — it did something unusual for a prestige series: it made 200-year-old, barely-changed Italian towns and palaces look like they had been designed specifically for the camera. Because in Highsmith’s case, they had. The author first visited Positano in the summer of 1951, spent several weeks on the Amalfi Coast, and wrote later that the coast gave birth to the novel. What Zaillian filmed in 2022 and 2023 are places where almost nothing has changed since Highsmith walked through them.

This guide covers the four areas at the centre of the series’ geography: Atrani (episodes 1–4, the village where Ripley first encounters Dickie Greenleaf), Capri (Villa Torricella, the house that became Dickie’s villa on screen), Naples (Palazzo Sanfelice and the Pio Monte della Misericordia, the Caravaggio church), and the Amalfi Coast road itself. For each location, we pair the filming context with the best available Viator experiences — because the terrain rewards guided visits, and because the most useful tool for this circuit is not a map but a driver who knows which coastal road tunnel opens onto which cliff-side view.

Atrani: Where Ripley Begins

Atrani is the smallest municipality in Italy by area — 12 hectares of cliff-face, narrow alleys, and stacked pastel buildings between two promontories at the eastern edge of Amalfi town. In the series, it is presented as “Mongibello,” the fictional village from Highsmith’s novel where Dickie Greenleaf has settled in the Neapolitan heat. The beach (Spiaggia di Atrani) is where Tom Ripley first meets Dickie and Marge Sherwood. The Piazzetta Umberto I appears repeatedly in exterior scenes. The stairways winding up through the village — some of them accessible only on foot — are among the most recognisable images from the first four episodes.

One production detail matters for visitors: the stairways going up from the village are genuinely in Atrani, but the moment you arrive at the top and enter Dickie’s villa, you have shifted to Capri. The interiors and exteriors of Villa Torricella are 30 kilometres away by sea. The production spliced two geographies seamlessly. If you walk up Atrani’s stairs expecting to find the villa at the top, you will find private homes instead. The payoff is still real — the stairs, the alleys, the church of San Salvatore de’ Birecto, and the bureau de poste are all intact filming locations. Atrani has 832 inhabitants and no car park. Bus SITA line 5120 from Amalfi takes five minutes and costs approximately €2.50 one way. Tickets must be purchased in advance at a tabaccheria or bar — they cannot be bought on the bus.

Airbnb reported a 93% increase in bookings in and around Atrani in the week following the April 2024 launch. A local host in the village, Antonella Florio, commented publicly: “This coast is already saturated. If more visitors come because of the series, I sincerely hope they arrive in low season.” Practical advice from the ground: low season here is November through March, and early April before the holiday period begins.

The most efficient way to build the Atrani visit into a day from Naples is a private or small-group Amalfi Coast tour, which can be customised to stop at Atrani specifically rather than bypassing it for the more obvious stop at Positano.

For solo travellers or couples who prefer a small group format over a private vehicle, the Amalfi–Ravello–Positano group tour covers the same three main coastal towns with a local guide and shared transport.

Capri: Dickie’s Island

Villa Torricella was built in 1902 by two American travellers who arrived on Capri in 1897 and never left. It sits 400 metres above Marina Grande, accessible by a road that takes roughly 15 minutes on foot from the port. The property consists of three separate residences with vaulted ceilings, interior columns, majolica tiles, and a wisteria-covered pergola that viewers of the series will recognise immediately. Zaillian’s production negotiated access with three different families to film the villa across its entirety. Today it is available for rent on Airbnb at approximately $500 per residence for two nights — a price that reflects both its cinematic profile and its genuine architectural quality.

The rest of Capri adds context. The Piazzetta — properly the Piazza Umberto I — is the social centre of the island, 142 steps above the port via the funicular. Villa Jovis, the 1st-century AD villa of Emperor Tiberius, is a 50-minute walk from the Piazzetta through the eastern part of the island; its ruins sit on a promontory 334 metres above sea level, with views stretching to the Gulf of Naples and the Sorrentine Peninsula. It is not a filming location for Ripley but anchors the island’s long history of serving as a retreat for powerful individuals seeking distance from the mainland — the resonance with Dickie Greenleaf’s character is clear enough.

The hydrofoil from Naples Molo Beverello to Capri Marina Grande runs approximately 16 times daily in summer and takes 45–50 minutes. One-way fares start at around €25. No private cars are permitted on the island. The funicular from Marina Grande to La Piazzetta costs €2.20 each way.

For a more comprehensive island visit that includes the Piazzetta, the Faraglioni rocks, and Anacapri — and departs from either Naples or Sorrento — the semi-private day tour covers the full Capri circuit with a smaller group format.

Naples: Ripley’s Other Italy

The Naples of Ripley is not the Naples of airport arrivals or Castel dell’Ovo postcard shots. Zaillian wanted the city as it appeared in the Italian neo-realist films of the 1950s and 1960s — crumbling baroque palaces, narrow streets where laundry hangs between buildings, interiors filtered through thick stone walls. He found it, and shot it, in two specific locations.

The first is Palazzo Sanfelice, in the Rione Sanità quarter north of the historic centre. Built in 1726 by Ferdinando Sanfelice, the palazzo contains one of the most spectacular double-ellipse staircases in baroque Naples. In Ripley, the courtyard and staircase stand in for Tom’s hotel in Palermo — a substitution the production makes with total confidence because the Rione Sanità’s buildings have changed so little since the 18th century. The palazzo is not normally open to the public as a tourist site; it is a residential building with an unlocked courtyard. The staircase can be seen from the entrance gate.

The second location is Pio Monte della Misericordia, on Via dei Tribunali six minutes’ walk from the cathedral. This 17th-century charitable institution holds the original canvas of Caravaggio’s Le Sette Opere di Misericordia (The Seven Works of Mercy, 1606–07) — a painting depicting seven corporal acts of mercy compressed into a single composition, lit in the painter’s characteristic chiaroscuro. Zaillian cited Caravaggio as the primary visual reference for the entire series; Robert Elswit specifically studied the contrast between light and shadow in this painting when developing the black-and-white photography approach. The painting hangs in the small upper-floor oratory and is open to the public. Admission is approximately €7.

For the wider Naples street-level experience — including the Spaccanapoli corridor, Decumani, and the historic centre as it operates at ground speed rather than walking pace — the motorbike tour covers more territory in less time.

The Amalfi Coast by Vespa, Boat and Road

The SS163 Amalfitana — the state road connecting Vietri sul Mare to Positano along the cliff edge — is one of the most cinematic roads in Europe and one of the least comfortable to drive. Its 50 kilometres of tight curves, single-lane tunnels, and sheer drops into the Tyrrhenian Sea were not designed for traffic in either volume or speed. The coaches and tour vans that now use it in summer have to reverse at passing points. The experience of driving it yourself in a rental car during peak season is genuinely unpleasant in a way the series does not show. What the series does show — or rather, imply through landscape cutaways — is what it looks like from a boat: the cliff face rising 300 to 600 metres from the water, the villages embedded in the rock like fossils.

The Amalfi Coast has been a cinema backdrop for seven decades. Roberto Rossellini filmed Viaggio in Italia here in 1954 with Ingrid Bergman. John Huston brought Humphrey Bogart to Ravello’s Villa Cimbrone for Beat the Devil in 1953. René Clément shot the original Plein Soleil (Purple Noon, 1960) with Alain Delon on nearby Procida and Ischia. Highsmith herself was there for all of it. The landscape carries that accumulated weight; it does not need to be announced.

The most cinematically coherent way to travel the Amalfi Coast is by Vespa, which is also the way the road was designed to be used. A guided Vespa tour from Amalfi or Sorrento puts the curves and tunnels in their correct proportion — you are moving at the right speed, you can stop at the passing points that double as viewpoints, and you arrive at each village without the anxiety of parking.

The Godfather of the Amalfi Coast tour takes its title from the coast’s deep connection with Italian cultural mythology — cinema, cuisine, and landscape as inseparable. The product centres on Positano and its food culture with a cinematic storytelling angle that complements the Ripley circuit well for visitors who want more than filming-location stops.

For visitors who want to combine the coast with Pompeii in one efficient day — both landscapes share the same atmosphere of civilisations preserved by catastrophe that runs through the background of Ripley — the combined Amalfi Coast and Pompeii tour with a local driver covers both in nine to ten hours from Naples.

The Herculaneum walking tour is a counterpart to Pompeii for visitors who want depth over scale. Herculaneum was smaller, wealthier, and is better preserved than Pompeii — its wooden structures, fabric, and organic materials were sealed by the 79 AD eruption in ways that Pompeii’s were not. For a series built around questions of identity, preservation, and what endures beneath surfaces, the site rewards time.

Planning Your Ripley Trip

For readers planning a broader film-location tour of Europe, our guide to Lord of the Rings filming locations in New Zealand applies the same set-jetting framework to a very different geography — useful as a reference for structuring a multi-location film trip before committing to logistics.

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