Sorrento

We’re spending a few days in a town we’ve heard about but never visited. It’s a good stop for us for the Easter weekend on the way south from Orvieto. We’ll stay here a few days and then travel on to visit relatives in Missanello.

Sorrento, old and new

Sorrento is across the bay from Naples and is the home of limoncello. That’s all we knew about Sorrento before we got here. Turns out it is a three dimensional city in the sense that a flat map doesn’t really tell you everything you need to know. Roads cross on a map but, because the town is built on a very steep slope, sometimes the crossing road is 30 feet, or 60 feet, or 100 feet below. On the map the streets appear to cross in two dimensions. That can be confusing.

Our hotel is centrally located off the main piazza but despite the help of our trusty GPS, Frances, we couldn’t find the place. The GPS said that we had arrived but the hotel just wasn’t there. We retraced our route and this time noticed a street that was parallel to the street we had driven on earlier. We parked illegally, walked over, and found that the “street” was a little wider than a sidewalk. A woman police officer said what was obvious, that the street was a “stradina”, a little street that one cannot drive on. (Strada = street, the suffix ina = signifies a diminutive.)

Mt. Vesuvius and the city of Naples

With her approval we hustled our suitcases out of the car and into the hotel and stashed the car in a parking garage as quickly as possible. Sorrento is a nightmare for cars and Easter weekend is a very busy weekend.

We checked the hotel website again and there is no specific mention of the obvious problem dropping off suitcases. The nice things that people had to say, however, were accurate.

The old town of Sorrento is below and the many, many hotels are built on sites carved out of the mountainside. There lots of restaurants, pizza joints, bars, and designer shops among the hotels but the most interesting restaurant that we had read about, da Emilia, was at the very bottom of the town, almost on the shore. 

Fishing off the pier

We trekked down to the restaurant. From the bottom of the town there was a view across the bay to Vesuvius and the city of Naples spread around its flanks. Men were fishing off the docks, seemingly unaware of the designer shops and the fancy cars and the hordes of window shoppers a few hundred feet above them in the upper town. 

For our Easter lunch we had the local specialties, spaghetti alle vongole (spaghettti with clams, tiny, tender little clams cooked in the heat of the pasta) and then fritta mista (mixed fried selection of fishes and other creatures from the bay of Naples.) We also had a Caprese salad since we were near the island of Capri.

At the end of the meal we asked for a limoncello which is commonly served everywhere in Italy. Of course, this restaurant doesn’t serve limoncello (probably because it is such an obvious  request.) Instead, we were offered two complementary, homemade digestivos (alcoholic drinks served at the end of a meal as an aid to digestion.) The first was black and had a licorice taste that was palate cleansing but a little harsh. The second was very interesting, a fennel liqueur of some kind, very refreshing. 

Diner leaving Da Emilia

The fennel liqueur reminded us that Annette’s cousin in Missanello had once served raw fennel at the end of a meal to refresh people’s sense of taste and it worked very nicely. So did the fennel liqueur (though I imagine that it must sound a little strange as I write this.)

Tomorrow morning we’re off the Missanello, population 500.

Happy Easter to all. Buona Pasqua a tutti.