Sorrento
Clifftop Resort Town On The Sorrentine Peninsula, The Transport Base For Pompeii, Herculaneum, Capri And The Amalfi Coast · Sorrento, Campania
Sorrento is the base rather than the destination, and being honest about that is the way to use it. The town sits on a tufa shelf a hundred metres above its own harbour, facing back across the bay at Vesuvius, and its beaches are wooden platforms bolted onto the rock rather than sand, which surprises people who booked on the photographs. What it has instead is position and transport: Pompeii and Herculaneum are thirty minutes up the local railway, Capri is a twenty-minute hydrofoil from the port below, Naples is an hour, and the Amalfi Coast begins on the other side of the peninsula. The town itself is a pleasant grid of lemon groves, inlaid woodwork shops and a long evening passeggiata, with a cloister that is one of the prettiest small spaces in Campania. It has been receiving visitors since the eighteenth century and is very good at it, which cuts both ways. Leave the car at home: everything worth reaching from here goes by train, bus or boat, and parking costs more than all three.
Piazza Tasso, Sorrento, Campania, 80067, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: streets, squares and the Villa Comunale terrace are public and never close. The cloister of San Francesco opens daily with long hours. Bathing platforms operate from roughly Easter to October and close for the winter. Hydrofoils and ferries run frequently in summer, thinly in winter, and are cancelled in wind. The Circumvesuviana runs from early morning to late evening all year. Shops close for part of the early afternoon outside high season. Confirm the boat timetable above all.