From a piazza in the town of Castellabate on the Cilento coast of Italy, you may lift your eyes over the rim of your cappuccino and drink in a panorama of sky and Mediterranean Sea from Salerno to the Gulf of Policastro. Looking way, way down, a fruited plain of vineyards, lemon trees and white fig stretches to the flanks of green mountains decked with wisps of vapor.

Standing at the same point in 1811, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, appointed king of Naples in the early 19th century, uttered words that the town has engraved on a wall near the castle: “Qui non si muore.” Roughly, “Here you do not die.”