Until about a century and a half ago, a tragedy befalls Positano: after the birth of the Unification of Italy the new policy did not favor certain Positano, like the rest of southern area that was neglected; vapors began to face the ocean; Positano not being able to race with them began to decline. At that time the village had eight thousand inhabitants. In the decade between 1860 and 1870 with the advent of the Unification of Italy, the heavy taxes on a territory already perceived as greedy and the military occupation of the country was depopulated the country. With the famous "Southern Question", it is said that there was a military post on the beach, where you will find the current Galley Restaurant, where the soldiers dispensed with the butt of the gun if you only came out at sea, many could not to pay taxes seeing confiscated houses and estates, and the east side of said Incanto Spiaggia Grande, Positano were carried out shootings who dared to rebel against the constraints imposed by the new Italian state, or who were suspected of robbery. According to the history of the south, Garibaldi betrayed the expectations of southerners (ironically, just a citizen of Positano, a Five was a baker by trade, was part of Garibaldi's expedition). In this context of fear and hunger, repression, about six thousand people to survive were forced to emigrate to America, the houses were empty, the walls crumbled, the paintings are discolored, the roof fell, people before leaving for the New World removed the windows of the houses to make sure that was not surveyed and taxed, giving a bleak landscape of that time, so Positano enjoyed the bad reputation of the name "ghost town". Since then, the population of Positano has never exceeded four thousand inhabitants.

Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Positano so it was almost depopulated, the emigration to America continued and just remember that in New York alone live well thirty thousand inhabitants of origin or kinship Positano to realize this. Since the beginning of the twentieth century occasionally some stranger happened by accident, but remained dazzled by the beauty of the place, so it was that Positano became as alcove of artists and many more in love with the country as the Neapolitan Caprile, the German Richard Oelze, Picasso, Carra, by the writers as Siegfried Kracauer, John Steinbeck, Corrado Alvaro, Dino Buzzati, Alberto Moravia, not to mention, of that group of German refugees, who from 1939 to 1945 took refuge in Positano to escape the Nazi tyranny, the writer Stefan Andres, Armin Wegner, Martin Wolff, the Russian painter Ivan Zagaruiko, the most appropriate description of this "paradise" we find it just by writer John Steinbeck: "When you happen to find a place as beautiful as Positano, your impulse and almost Always keep your discovery. Consider: "If the story is filled with tourists who ruin, the locals begin to live according to the tourism and goodbye to your wonderful discovery!", yet, he described in an article in Positano in "Harper's Bazaar" in 1953 as a "dream place that is never quite real until we're alive and that becomes animated when you're gone. The houses are built on a hill so steep it would be a cliff if it were not carved stairs.

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