Sorrento

Sorrento is a small town in the region of Campania with some 16,500 inhabitants. It is a popular tourist destination which can be reached easily from Naples and Pompeii. The town overlooks the Bay of Naples as the key place of the Sorrentine Peninsula, and many viewpoints allow sight of
Naples itself, Vesuvius and the Isle of Capri.

The Amalfi Drive (connecting Sorrento and Amalfi) is a narrow road that threads along the high cliffs above the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Sorrento is famous for the production of Limoncello, a digestif made from lemon rinds, alcohol, water and sugar. Other agricultural production includes citrus fruit, wine, nuts and olives. Wood craftsmanship is also developed.

The city was built under the Roman Empire, and named Surrentum.The most important temples of Surrentum were those of Athena and of the Sirens (the latter the only one in the Greek world in historic times); the former gave its name to the promontory. In antiquity Surrentum was famous for its wine (oranges and lemons which are now so much cultivated there not having been introduced into Italy in antiquity), its fish, and its red Campanian vases.

Sorrento has an interesting cultural past: it was the birthplace of the poet Torquato Tasso, author of the Gerusalemme Liberata, and in the 1920s, famous Soviet writer Maxim Gorky lived in Sorrento.
In the 1940s, widely renowned astro-physicist Ian Dickson lived in Sorrento. He owned one of the most expensive houses on the bay of Naples.