Scialatielli, the thick ribbon pasta now treated across the region as ancient tradition, was invented in 1978 by an Amalfi chef, Enrico Cosentino, for a cookery competition. Much of what an Amalfi Coast cooking class tour teaches is similarly young — technique passed down through households rather than guilds, formalised only in the last two generations. The older layer runs deeper. The maritime Republic of Amalfi, one of Italy's four historic sea powers, traded with Byzantium and North Africa from the ninth century, and durum wheat, dried fruit and spices moved through its harbour long before they reached the coastal kitchen. The landscape did the rest. Vertical ground forced farmers to cut terraces into limestone, retained by dry-stone walls laid without mortar and shaded by chestnut pergolas. On those steps grows the sfusato amalfitano, a tapering lemon with thick, low-acid peel and pith mild enough to eat sliced. UNESCO inscribed the Costiera Amalfitana as a cultural landscape in 1997, citing precisely this agricultural terracing. Inland and above, Agerola's pastures supply fior di latte; the plains south of Salerno supply buffalo mozzarella. Gragnano, over the ridge, has extruded bronze-cut dried pasta commercially since the mid-nineteenth century. That geography explains why farmhouse kitchens, not restaurants, anchor the region's culinary teaching. Working agriturismi keep the terraces in production: olives pressed on site, tomatoes grown at altitude, milk stretched into mozzarella the morning it arrives. Lemons picked from those same terraces become limoncello, steeped in alcohol for weeks before any sugar is added. A corso di cucina costiera held on one of these properties is, in practical terms, a working farm opening its kitchen to visitors. Wine comes from the same slopes — Furore and Tramonti bottles built on Falanghina, Piedirosso and the near-extinct Tintore vine. The teaching itself is deliberately unfussy. Pasta is made without machines: flour on a board, egg or water, a wooden rolling pin. Mozzarella is cut, scalded and pulled by hand until it turns glossy. Tiramisù — Veneto in origin, adopted here without apology — closes most menus, and the four-course farmhouse table that follows is not a garnish on the lesson but the proof of it. Amalfi Coast cooking class tours now outnumber the trattorie that once taught the same lessons informally, and the recipes travel home intact.