With its steep, cliffside setting along Italy’s picturesque Amalfi coast and pastel-colored buildings that seem to cascade down to the Tyrrhenian Sea, the town of Positano has been a holiday resort since the time of the Roman Empire.

However, Positano was still a relatively poor fishing village during the first half of the twentieth century. It began to attract large numbers of tourists in the 1950s, especially after the iconic American writer John Steinbeck published an essay about his visit there in Harper’s Bazaar in 1953, the date of this menu.

‘It is a dream place that isn't quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone,’ Steinbeck wrote.

The Italian cruise line Societa di Navigazione, based in Genoa, made this little enclave - that still has only about 4,000 permanent residents today - one of its ports of call, hence this lovely drawing of the location on a menu cover from the ship Conte Biancamano.

This passenger ship, built in the shipyards of Scotland in 1925, epitomized Italian style.

There were elegant public salons filled with designer furniture and paintings and murals by noted Italian artists. Cabins were large and luxurious and outside there were verandas, immense promenade decks and swimming pools.

In 1957, the ship secretly transported the embalmed corpse of Maria Maggi, also known as Evita Peron and the wife of the former Argentine President Juan Domingo Peron, from Buenos Aires to Genoa.

She had died in 1952, at the age of 33, of cancer, but continued to attract a cult-like fame among low-income and working-class Argentines, who were referred to as descamisados or ‘shirtless ones.'

In the wake of the coup that deposed her husband, the Argentine military – with the covert assistance of the Vatican – tried to break the hold the hugely popular First Lady had over the population by having her body buried in a Milan cemetery under a false name.

Two decades later in 1976, Evita’s remains were removed and finally placed in her family's mausoleum in Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. The operation was overseen by Argentina’s dictatorship.

Today she lies in a crypt fortified like a nuclear bunker, buried five meters underground, so no one should ever again be able to disturb the remains of Argentina's most controversial First Lady.

A large section of the Conte Biancamano is preserved at the Leonardo Da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan.