SORRENTO · ITALY
Lemon groves, sea-cliff towns, and the long blue bay.
Boat days to Capri and the Blue Grotto, the cliff road to Positano and Amalfi, Pompeii and Vesuvius, and the lemon farms and pizza tables in between.
Only here
Three things you can only do on this bay.
Boat rides and food tours turn up in every guidebook. A Roman city frozen by a volcano, a cave lit electric-blue from below, and the lemon that became a drink belong to this coast alone.
Stopped in AD 79
Walk into Pompeii
Vesuvius buried Pompeii in a single afternoon in AD 79 and sealed it for seventeen centuries. You walk the original lava-paved streets past bakeries, bath houses and frescoed villas, the cart ruts still worn into the stone. No museum comes close to a whole Roman city you can walk straight through.
- 1 Pompeii: Entry Ticket with Optional Audio Guide
- 2 Pompeii Small Group Tour with an Archaeologist
- 3 Pompeii: Archaeological Park Tour with Ticket on request
Light from below
Row into the Blue Grotto
The Grotta Azzurra opens barely above the waterline on Capri, so low you lie back in a wooden rowboat to slip through the mouth. Inside, sunlight passes under the rock and turns the whole cavern an electric, lit-from-within blue. Nowhere else does the sea glow quite like this.
- 1 Capri: Island Boat Trip with Grottos
- 2 Sorrento: Exclusive Capri Boat Tour and Optional Blue Grotto
- 3 Capri Blue Grotto Small-Group Boat Day Tour From Sorrento
Where it was invented
Limoncello in the groves
The huge sfusato lemons terraced above Sorrento are the reason limoncello exists, and the farms still press them by hand. You taste it cold under the lemon pergolas it came from, with the sea below. It travels in a bottle, but it never tastes the same once it leaves the coast.
- 1 Sorrento Farm and Food Experience including Olive Oil, Limoncello, Wine tasting
- 2 Sorrento: Coast and Capri Boat Trip with Limoncello Tasting
- 3 Sorrento: Pizza Lesson, Wine, and Limoncello at a Local Farm
The one everyone books
If you do one thing from Sorrento, make it this.
More travellers book this than anything else along the whole bay.
The classics
Sorrento's Most Popular Tours
Capri, the Amalfi Coast, Pompeii and Vesuvius. The days most travellers come to Sorrento for.
Where to begin
The days a Sorrento trip is built around.
Capri and the Blue Grotto, the Amalfi Coast, Pompeii and Vesuvius, the cooking classes and the lemon farms. The handful of days most trips are planned around, and the best way to do each.
Your base on the bay
Sorrento is the base. The rest is a day trip.
The peninsula sits dead centre of everything worth seeing: the island, the coast and the cities the volcano buried are each an easy hop from the harbour. Pick the day that pulls you most.
Positano to Ravello
The most beautiful road in Italy.
Past the tip of the peninsula the cliffs fall straight into the sea and the towns cling on wherever they can: Positano in pink and ochre, Amalfi around its striped cathedral, Ravello in the gardens high above. Thirteen hairpin miles you take slowly, by car with a driver or by boat looking back up at all of it.
See the best Amalfi Coast tours →Lemons & long lunches
The coast you eat and drink.
This is where limoncello was first poured and where the lemons grow as big as your hand. Spend a morning pulling pasta and stretching mozzarella with a Sorrento family, a long lunch on a working lemon farm, or an afternoon tasting the wines grown in Vesuvius’ black volcanic soil.
Find a cooking class or tasting →On the water
The coast looks better from the sea.
Half of what makes this stretch of Italy only opens up from a boat: the grottoes under Capri, the waterfalls below the Amalfi road, the swimming coves you can’t reach on foot, and the whole bay turning gold at sunset. Charter a private gozzo or share a day cruise.
Cruises & boat trips →Buried in AD 79
The cities the volcano kept.
When Vesuvius erupted it smothered Pompeii in ash and sealed Herculaneum under mud, and so kept them whole: streets, shops, frescoes, even bread still in the ovens. Half an hour from Sorrento you walk straight into them, then climb to the crater that did it.
- 1 Pompeii: Entry Ticket with Optional Audio Guide
- 2 Pompeii Small Group Tour with an Archaeologist
- 3 Pompeii: Archaeological Park Tour with Ticket on request
By place
The whole bay, five ways.
Sorrento for the base. Capri for the grottoes. Positano for the cliffs. Amalfi for the cathedral. Pompeii for the ruins under the volcano.
By type
Or pick by the kind of day.
Boat tours if you want the sea. Pompeii and Vesuvius if you want the ancient world. Cooking classes and lemon farms if you want the table. Sunset cruises, sea kayaking, and the rest.
Plan it
Three perfect days.
Never been? Here is a long weekend that hits the essentials without a wasted hour.
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