craft products: furthermore, scripts of the Fifteenth Century a.D. have underlined that, in former centuries, commercial activities had taken place on the most famous beach in Praiano, called “Praia”.
The most important places of interest in Praiano, which recall its past, are:
  1. the “Assiola” (or “Sciola”) tower, built in 1278 (during the reign of Carlo d’Angiò);
  2. the ancient “Casa del Navigatore”, where you can admire a painting of 1500 that represents Spanish boats in the Amalfi Coast;
  3. the ancient Church and Abbey of “Santa Maria ad Castro”, rebuilt in 1735 and restructured in 1975 thanks to the important contribution of the inhabitants of Praiano: accessible from a path (through the “Vallata della Fontanella”), the abbey lies on the “Vallata del Campo” and offers a great view of Praiano and the Coast; apart from the landscape, the main characteristic of the abbey is the fact that its church could have been built after a miracle, that is the discovery of a painting of the “Beata Vergine delle Grazie”;
  4. the Church of “San Luca” (the Saint Patron of Praiano), where you can find works of art by Padovano di Montorio and Giovan Bernardo Lama; furthermore, there was a wooden crib that was stolen in 1968;
  5. the Church of “Santa Maria di Costantinopoli”, from which the view of the sea is great;
  6. the Church of “San Gennaro” in Vettica, where there are works of Giovan Bernardo Lama and a beautiful landscape.
Nowadays Praiano is called “the heart of the Amalfi Coast” and is a quiet place whose economy is mainly based on tourism and fishing: in fact, on the “Praia” beach many fishermen get off their boats every morning, and there are a lot of restaurant where you can have delightful meals based on ancient recipes.
A very interesting and almost legendary place is a discotheque called “Africana”: it is a natural cave, very close to the sea and decorated with various objects that come from Africa and make it a bit mysterious. The owner of this wonderful cave, Luca Marino, decided to make it a discotheque when he met the famous dancer Margot Fonteyn, very keen on ethnical music and African art: they loved each other and left afterwards, but the disco continued to be open, and this is still true, even if Luca Marino died in 2005. Many famous people visited the Night Club: among them, we can mention John Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, The Queen of Netherlands and Rudolph Nureyev.