How to set an Amalfi table

On the Amalfi Coast, the table is not dressed to impress. It is dressed because lunch will last three hours and the light on the ceramic is part of the meal.

Start with linen. Cream, slightly rumpled, the hem still showing the stitch. In Amalfi houses the napkins are the same cloth as the cloth itself — flax that has been washed until it feels like a shirt. Fold them loosely. A stiff napkin is a hotel napkin.

Then the plates from Vietri sul Mare. A lemon dinner plate for the main, a smaller maiolica for fruit or a second pasta. They will not match like a boxed set from a department store. That is the point. The blue of one rim will sit next to the blue of another, close enough that the table looks collected, not catalogued.

Leave room for a bowl of actual lemons. Not as decoration — as something people will take in their hands. A sprig of olive if you have it. A glass of something cold and yellow. And then sit down before everything is perfect. The coast does not wait for perfect.