Sorrento
September 23, 2006
Sorrento is a little town on the sea to the south and west of Naples.
For some reason, I had remembered Sorrento as being a very nice, very friendly and very walkable little town. I was there one other time, in the year 2000. This time, it still seemed like a pretty town, but also fairly boring and quite -- uh -- vulgar, in terms of tourist rip-off joints.
And the car traffic was a mess.
On the street, I passed an American girl talking into a mobile phone. She was saying, "I've been here two weeks and I'm bored out of my mind! I've been counting the days until I can finally leave!" I can see why she would say this. If it had not been for the beach, I could not have filled an entire day there with things to do.
Imagine two weeks!
But, like I said, it's a pretty place.
Oddly enough, I think the most interesting thing that I saw was a shop full of ceramic lemons on the main square in the town.
Here are the photos.
The beach at the tip of the Capo di Sorrento is not a sand beach at all, but rather a rocky piece of coast surrounding the ruins of the villa of one Roman gentleman named Pollius Felix. During Imperial times, the Sorrentine peninsula was a sort of like the Hamptons for rich Romans, including the Emperors are their families. The stretch of coast between Naples and Sorrento is littered with the ruins of Roman estates, some of them enormous in scale.
If there is a sunny day next week, I'm going to go back.
Just to take another dip in the water, not to visit the town.
I'm starting to have this dreadful feeling that I'm going to run out of time here in Naples before I've seen everything that I want to see. Not only do I still need to take the trip out to Pompeii, which is just up the road from Sorrento, I also want to go around through the towns and see the Roman remains at Stabiae, Oplontis and Villa Regina (in Boscoreale).
And this on top of everything else I want to do.
I'm on my feet from dawn to dusk here and it seems like I'm not making that much progress against my to-do list. Heh. Oh, well ... This is supposed to be a vacation, after all.
One reason that I wanted to come to Naples above other destinations in Italy was that I knew that it was practically inexhaustible in terms of cultural tourism. Unlike the girl in Sorrento, I would never be bored. But there is a down side to that. I'll end up leaving here knowing that I did not get to see everything.
Anyway, we're having nice weather here today, but I've got my jeans on so that I can finally go into some of the old churches and monasteries here in Naples. Tomorrow, I'm zipping up to Rome to meet up with an American friend who is also traveling in Italy. Monday, I'll be back down here.