How Was Sorrento Built

The historic centre still follows its Roman plan: two main axes crossing at right angles, with a tight grid of lanes between them. Nearly two thousand years of rebuilding has not moved the streets, because the buildable shelf is narrow and the pattern was already the efficient one.

The town is built of and on tufa, a soft volcanic stone that cuts easily and hardens on exposure. That made cellars, cisterns and cliff stairs cheap to excavate, and it is why the coastline here is vertical rather than sloping. The Vallone dei Mulini, a ravine running into the centre, held water mills until the nineteenth century, when land reclamation cut it off from the sea and left the buildings at the bottom to the damp.

Sixteenth-century walls enclose the old town, built after the Turkish raid and incorporating older Greek-era stonework in places. The Sedile Dominova, an open frescoed loggia from the fifteenth century where the nobility met, is the only structure of its kind left in Campania.

The most recent addition is the least architectural and the most used: the lidi, wooden bathing platforms cantilevered out over the rocks, rebuilt every few years because there is nowhere else to put a beach.