SORRENTO - Back in 1884, Cook’s tourist’s Handbook to Southern Italy noted soberly that Sorrento, birthplace of the great 16th-century poet Torquato Tasso, ‘is a good stopping place’, adding that the surrounding ravines make for charming walks ‘especially in the evening, when they have such a weirdness and gloominess, that the people light the lamps in the oratories perched on the rocks, to keep away hobgoblins and foul fiends’. The foul fiends have long since been replaced by reliable hordes of British and German tourists, who, it appears, concur with Cook’s century-old assessment. A pleasant town, Sorrento is handy for Capri (20 minutes away) and tha Amalfi coast. The distance from Pompeii is 30 minutes away by train. To the ancient Greeks, the area around Sorrento was the Temple of the Sirens. Sailors of antiquity were powerless to resist the beautiful song of these maidens, half women and half fish, who without fail would lure them and their vessels to their doom on reefs. Homer’s Odysseus (Ulysses) was determined to hear the other-wordly melodies, and so strapped himself to the mast of his ship as he sailed past the fatal place.
