Amalfi Coast, Italy - 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

A town built into a ravine on the Amalfi coast, with the coast road crossing in front of it on stone arches. The road is the reason this works as a puzzle: it puts a hard structural line right across the bottom third.

What you are looking at

White and cream houses with green shutters, stacked up both sides of a cleft in the cliff, with a few in ochre and rose among them. A church tower with a tiled dome and an arcaded belfry sits in the middle of them. Above and behind, terraced hillside and then bare grey limestone mountains.

Across the foreground runs the coast road on a masonry viaduct, its arches open to the sea, with cars parked nose to tail along the parapet. Below it a small shingle beach and a jetty, white boats moored in green water that turns deep blue further out, and a rocky point at the right. Clear sky, hard midday light.

What it is like to build

Do the viaduct first and you have cut the puzzle in half. The arches are dark, regular and repeating, the parapet is a straight pale line the full width of the picture, and the parked cars are a row of small saturated colours. It is the most legible band in the image.

Then the town, sorted by roof rather than by wall. Most of the buildings are the same white, so white pieces are nearly useless as a pile. The roofs are not: terracotta pantiles, flat grey, the church's coloured dome. Find a roof, work down the wall beneath it.

The sea and the sky are the two large quiet regions and they want opposite treatments. The sea has a real gradient from green at the shore to navy offshore, so sort it in strips. The sky is nearly uniform and is best left to the very end, when the hole tells you more than the picture does.

Why the Jumbo build matters

Jumbo are Dutch and have been making puzzles for over a century. Their board is firm with a matt finish, the pieces are cut for a positive fit, and the print holds fine detail well, which matters on an image where a whole town is rendered at the scale of a few centimetres. This is their Premium Quality line.

Specifications

A little context

The Amalfi coast and the Cinque Terre get bought for the same reason and build very differently, which is worth knowing before you choose. Cinque Terre villages are painted in strong separate colours, so the buildings sort themselves. Amalfi towns are mostly white, so the sorting has to happen on roofs and shutters instead. Amalfi is the harder of the two. For the other kind, see Manarola.

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Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.