Four days in Sorrento: the Amalfi Coast without the hairpin bends
Three nights on the cliff, with boats to Positano, Amalfi and Capri leaving from the harbour underneath, and a town to come back to that is not a film set.
- Length
- 4 days, 3 nights
- Where you stay
- Sorrento
- Places
- 10 across 4 days
The Amalfi Coast has a road problem. It is a single carriageway cut into a cliff with a bus service that meets itself on blind corners, and in summer a journey that looks like twenty minutes takes two hours. People book a hotel in Positano, spend four days on that road, and come home exhausted.
Sorrento is the answer, and it is not a compromise. It sits on a flat shelf of tufa above its own harbour on the other side of the peninsula, it has a fast ferry service to everywhere worth reaching, and it is a working town of sixteen thousand people rather than a cliff of hotels, which means restaurants at ordinary prices and a life that continues in the evening.
So the shape of four days here is: one for the town, one for the villages by boat, one for Capri, and a last morning for the strange things you walked past on the first day.
Highlights
- The coast seen from the water, which is the way it was designed to be seen
- A Roman villa buried by Vesuvius, excavated underneath a church in the middle of Positano
- Tiberius's clifftop palace on Capri, an hour's walk above the crowds
- A green gorge cut through the middle of town, with a derelict mill stranded at the bottom
Where to stay
Sorrento, three nights
A Greek and then Roman resort town, on a cliff above two small harbours, at the top of a peninsula that separates the bay of Naples from the bay of Salerno. Vesuvius is directly across the water and in the frame from every terrace on the north side.
It has been receiving visitors since the eighteenth century, so it is thoroughly used to them, and the old grid of streets behind the main square still has the inlaid furniture workshops, the food shops and the churches that were there before the first English poet arrived.
Day by day
Day 1 in Sorrento
The town, the cloister, and the sunset over the volcano
Sorrento is smaller than its reputation and you can see the centre of it in an afternoon. The street plan inside the old walls is still the Roman grid, and the narrow lanes running off the main street are full of workshops selling inlaid wood, a local craft going back three centuries that produces everything from music boxes to whole tables.
The one genuinely beautiful thing in the middle of town is a fourteenth century cloister with interlaced arches on two sides, Arab in feeling, attached to a church and open to walk into for nothing.
Finish on the public terrace at the cliff edge. It looks north across the water at Vesuvius, and the light going off the volcano at seven in the evening is the reason people fall for this stretch of coast.
- 16:00
Piazza Torquato Tasso
ArchitectureThe main square, which is a road junction with cafés on it and is the centre of everything anyway. Prices here are double what they are two streets away, which is the price of the seat.
- 17:00
Church of San Francesco
ReligiousA small cloister of pointed, interlaced arches on octagonal columns, some of them recycled from Roman buildings, planted with bougainvillea. Concerts happen here in summer and it is free the rest of the time.
- 18:30
Villa Comunale
VisitThe public gardens on the cliff, with a terrace looking across the bay at Vesuvius and a lift down to the Marina Piccola where the ferries go from. Free, and the best sunset in town.
- 20:00
Dinner in the old lanes
EatOff the main street, where the tables are small and the menus are not in five languages. Gnocchi alla sorrentina if it is on, then a limoncello you did not order.
With more time: The wood inlay museum, five minutes away in an old palazzo, explains what all those workshops are doing and has pieces from the nineteenth century that are genuinely astonishing. Half an hour, and it makes the shop windows make sense.
Day 2 in Sorrento
Positano and Amalfi, by boat
Take the first fast ferry of the day. Approaching Positano from the sea is the entire point: the village is a slot in the cliff, painted in ochres and pinks, stacked so steeply that the streets are staircases and the only thing at the bottom is the beach you land on.
Under the church with the majolica dome there is a Roman villa, buried by the same eruption that took Pompeii, excavated in the last few decades and opened to visitors. You go down a staircase from a side chapel into a frescoed room with a wall of red and gold that nobody saw for nineteen centuries.
Then the second boat, east along the cliffs to Amalfi. Amalfi was an independent maritime republic before Venice mattered, trading with Egypt and Byzantium, and the cathedral it built with the proceeds is at the top of sixty-odd steps and looks like nothing else in Italy.
- 09:30
Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta
ReligiousThe church on the beach with the coloured tiled dome, holding a Byzantine icon of a black Madonna that the town says was stolen by pirates and put ashore here. Modest inside, and the reason to go in is what is underneath it.
- 10:45
Roman archaeological museum and villa (MAR)
HistoricA Roman villa under the church, buried in 79 and dug out in our own time, with a frescoed wall of winged figures on deep red. Small, timed and genuinely thrilling. Book a slot if you can; it takes forty minutes.
- 13:00
Lunch on the water in Amalfi
EatGet the boat on to Amalfi and eat there rather than in Positano, where lunch on the beach costs what dinner does anywhere else.
- 14:30
Amalfi Cathedral
ReligiousStriped, arched and gold, at the top of a wide flight of steps, with a bell tower in coloured tiles beside it and Saint Andrew in the crypt, brought here from Constantinople in 1208.
With more time: Ravello is a bus ride up the hill behind Amalfi, twenty minutes and four hundred metres of climb, and it is the quiet, elegant alternative to the seafront villages: two villa gardens on the cliff edge, one of which has a terrace of marble busts hanging over a thousand-foot drop. Worth a whole afternoon if you skip Positano.
Day 3 in Sorrento
Capri, above the crowds
Capri is twenty-five minutes away by fast boat and is two different places. The first is the port and the little square above it, which in season is a slow-moving crowd of people shopping for handbags. The second begins about fifteen minutes' walk in any direction from that square, and is almost empty.
Go up to Anacapri first, the higher and older village, by the bus that grinds up the cliff road. The house at the top was built by a Swedish doctor around 1900 on the ruins of one of Tiberius's villas, and he filled it with Roman fragments and left a sphinx on the parapet looking out at the bay.
In the afternoon walk east from the main square along a lane between garden walls, uphill for about forty-five minutes, to the ruined palace where the emperor Tiberius spent his last decade running the empire by signal fire. It is three hundred metres straight above the sea and almost nobody makes the walk.
- 09:45
Villa San Michele
HistoricA white house on the rim of the cliff, full of Roman sculpture the owner dug up on the spot, with a covered loggia and a view down onto the port a chairlift ride below. Go early, before the tour groups arrive from the boats.
- 12:30
Lunch in Anacapri
EatThe upper village is where the island eats. Ravioli capresi and a caprese salad made with tomatoes that taste of something, at half the price of the port.
- 14:30
Villa Jovis
HistoricTiberius's villa on the eastern headland: cisterns, terraces and the foundations of a huge house on a clifftop, reached by a steady forty-five minute climb from the main square. Take water and go in the afternoon when the light is behind you.
With more time: The Blue Grotto is the famous one and it is a lottery: it opens only in calm seas, involves queueing in a boat and then lying flat in a rowing boat to get through the entrance, and the visit lasts about five minutes. Magnificent if the sea and the light cooperate, a waste of a morning if they do not. The chairlift up Monte Solaro from Anacapri is the safer spectacular.
Day 4 in Sorrento
The ravine, the lanes, and the train
The last morning is for the thing everybody walks past. In the middle of Sorrento, behind a railing on a busy street, the ground opens into a deep green ravine with a ruined flour mill at the bottom of it, abandoned in the nineteenth century when the square above was built and the airflow changed. It is now full of ferns and impossible to reach, which is what makes it strange.
Then the old lanes, for lemons, for inlaid wood if you want it, and for something to eat on the train.
The station is in the middle of town and the Circumvesuviana runs to Naples and Pompeii from it, so nothing about leaving is difficult.
- 09:30
Valley of the Mills
NatureLook down from the bridge on the main street. The mill stopped working in the 1860s and the gorge has been left to itself since, so what you are looking at is a wet green canyon in the middle of a town.
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- 10:30
Via San Cesareo
VisitThe old shopping street, one of the oldest in the town, with limoncello shops offering tastings, a fruit and vegetable market at the far end, and the wood workshops in the side lanes.
- 12:30
Last lunch, then the Circumvesuviana
EatA slice of delizia al limone and a coffee standing at a bar, then five minutes to the station. Keep your bag in front of you on the train.
With more time: If your train is late in the day, Pompeii is thirty-five minutes up the line and half a day is enough for the forum, the main houses and the theatre. It is the one thing near here that is better in the morning than in the afternoon.
Before you go
Where to stay
In the old town, inside the grid of narrow streets between the main square and the cathedral, or on the cliff edge west of it if the view matters more than the price. Both are ten minutes from the port lift and the ferry terminal, which is the thing that actually determines how good your days are.
Sant'Agnello and Meta, the next stops down the railway, are cheaper, quieter and only a few minutes away, and both have their own station. Staying up in the hills behind is lovely, expensive and only works with a car.
Getting around, and the road
Take boats. From about April to October, fast ferries run from Sorrento to Capri, Positano, Amalfi and Naples several times a day, they take a fraction of the time the bus does, and you arrive at the front of each village rather than at the top of it. Buy tickets at the harbour the day before in high season.
The coast road exists and the yellow buses do run it, but understand what you are choosing: an hour and a half of hairpins standing up, and traffic jams where two coaches meet. It is worth doing once, for the view, in the direction where you sit on the sea side. Driving it yourself in July is a bad idea, and parking on the coast costs more than lunch.
For Naples and Pompeii, the Circumvesuviana train runs from Sorrento's own station, takes just over an hour, and is grubby but reliable.
Tickets and timing
Nothing here needs booking except the ferries in August and, if you want it, the Blue Grotto, which depends entirely on the sea state and closes at short notice. Capri day tickets, chairlifts and buses are all bought on the spot.
Ferry season is roughly Easter to the end of October. Outside it you are on the bus, which changes the maths of this whole trip and makes a coast-side base more attractive.
Eating
Lemons, in everything. The local variety is enormous, thick-skinned and sweet enough to eat in a salad, and limoncello is made from the peel steeped in alcohol. Every second shop sells it and most offer a taste; the cheap supermarket bottles are not the same drink.
Otherwise it is the food of the bay of Naples: gnocchi baked with tomato and mozzarella in a terracotta dish, seafood spaghetti, and a delta of a lemon cake called delizia al limone. Eat in the old town lanes rather than on the main square, and inland rather than at the marina if you want the price to drop.
The coast rewards people who slow down and punishes people who try to see it all. Two villages in a day is plenty, done by boat, with a long lunch in the middle.
Come back over the water in the evening with the cliffs going pink behind you, and you will not care what you missed.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Should I stay in Sorrento or on the Amalfi Coast itself?
- Sorrento if you want to move around, and that is most people. It has the ferries, the train, the choice of restaurants and prices that are not resort prices. Stay in Positano or Amalfi if you want to be in one beautiful place and barely leave it, and accept that everything else becomes a project.
- Is the coast road worth doing?
- Once, one way, on the sea side of the bus, outside July and August. The views genuinely are what people say. Doing it in both directions on the same day, in summer traffic, is how a holiday gets spent in a coach.
- Is Capri worth a day trip?
- Yes, if you leave the port. The square at the top of the funicular is a designer shopping street with a view, and it is what most day trippers see. Anacapri, the walk to Tiberius's villa and the chairlift up the mountain are all within an hour of that square and all quiet.
- When should I come?
- May, June, September or early October. The ferries are running, the sea is warm from June, and the coast is not yet at a standstill. August is when Italy itself takes its holiday here and everything doubles. In winter the boats stop, half the hotels close and the coast is a different, quieter place.
- Can I do Pompeii and Vesuvius from here?
- Both, easily. Pompeii is thirty-five minutes by train and a half day at least. Vesuvius takes a bus from the Pompeii stop up to the car park and a stony walk to the crater, and adding it to Pompeii makes for a long, hot day. Give each its own morning if you can.