Everything worth doing here is a boat or a bus away. Start with the right one.
Whether the Blue Grotto is open the morning you sail. Which Pompeii ticket comes with a guide worth having. Reviews of every tour you can book from the peninsula.
Four bookings a first week on the peninsula is built around.
The excavations, the crossing to Capri, the coast under sail and an afternoon in the lemon groves. What each costs, and what the people who went say.
01The first morningEntry Ticket and Guided Tour with an ArchaeologistGo on the earliest slot with a guide who reads the site. By eleven the forum is full and the stone is throwing heat back at you.
02The island crossingExclusive Capri Boat Tour and Optional Blue GrottoSorrento to Capri by boat, round the Faraglioni, into the Blue Grotto if the sea allows. The day everyone books and nobody regrets.
03The coast by waterAmalfi and Positano Boat TourPositano and Amalfi from the sea, which is the only angle that explains why anyone built there. The coast road takes twice as long and shows you half.
04The lemon afternoonSorrento Farm and Food Experience including Olive Oil, Limoncello, Wine tastingA working farm above the town: olive press, limoncello still, lunch under the pergola. The slow half-day that balances a week of ruins.
From Sorrento the good days start on a hull, not a hairpin.
The peninsula faces two ways. West is Capri and the grottoes; east is Positano, Amalfi and a coastline of villages the road can only look down on. Three kinds of day on the water, what it costs to board each one, and where it lands you.
Eight places within a morning of a Sorrento hotel door.
A buried Roman town and the volcano that buried it, an island of limestone stacks, three coast villages stitched onto a cliff, and a Greek temple field down the far end of the bay. Each one, and the best day out in it.
Pompeii is enormous, and the ticket you buy decides how much of it you understand.
Everything at Pompeii →
Sixty-six hectares, no shade and very little signage. The difference between a hot walk and a Roman city is entirely a matter of who is talking. These three are the ways in that people actually take.
Walked through by an archaeologist
The houses that stay locked to general admission open on these, and the graffiti, the bakeries and the drainage stop being rubble and start being a town. Worth the difference over a plain ticket.
Entry, timed, with an audio guide
Cheapest way through the gate, and fine if you have read ahead. Take the first slot of the day: the site opens at nine and the coach groups land around eleven.
Herculaneum, in half the time
Buried by mud rather than ash, so upper floors, wooden doors and carbonised furniture all survived. Small enough to do properly in a morning, which Pompeii is not.
Capri empties at five. Book the day that outlasts the ferry crowd.
Every hydrofoil lands in the same hour and everyone walks the same street to the Piazzetta. The island the day-trippers miss is the one seen from a hull: the Faraglioni arch, the green and white grottoes, a swim off Marina Piccola, then the chairlift up Monte Solaro while the port empties.
The days out this coast is busiest selling.
Every tour we have reviewed here →More travellers take these than anything else on the peninsula, and each one earns the slot for a different reason.
1
Entry Ticket and Guided Tour with an Archaeologist
Explore Pompeii with an archaeologist, skip the ticket line, and see its homes, temples, brothel, baths, and plaster casts in a 2-hour small-group tour.
From · $35
Read our review →
2
Entry Ticket with Optional Audio Guide
from $26
3
Small Group Tour with an Archaeologist
from $40
4
Pompeii Small Group Tour with an Archaeologist
from $35
5
Island Boat Trip with Grottos
from $28
6
Exclusive Capri Boat Tour and Optional Blue Grotto
from $143
7
Sorrento Farm and Food Experience including Olive Oil, Limoncello, Wine tasting
from $114
8
Capri Blue Grotto Small-Group Boat Day Tour From Sorrento
from $131
Positano is a staircase with a beach at the bottom. Arrive by boat.
The town is vertical and the road above it is a queue from June to September. From the water you get the postcard first and the climb second, and the boats drop you on the Spiaggia Grande instead of a kilometre uphill from it.
Every Positano day out →
Vesuvius is a ninety-minute walk with the whole bay underneath it.
A bus takes you to a thousand metres and the last stretch to the crater rim is loose gravel on foot. Go in the morning for the view down to Naples and Capri; by afternoon the haze usually wins. On the way down the slopes are vineyards, which is not a coincidence.
- 1Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius with Lunch and Wine Tastingfrom $141
- 2Priority Access Pompeii & Mt. Vesuvius Full day from Sorrentofrom $139
- 3Pompeii and Vesuvius Guided Tour with Lunchfrom $130
What a day out from Sorrento actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by price. Plenty of the best days on this coast cost less than dinner in Positano.
Excavation tickets, town walks, limoncello and mozzarella tastings, and the short hops along the coast.
The full days: the Capri boat, Positano and Amalfi by sea, Vesuvius paired with Pompeii, cooking lessons on a farm.
Private guides in the excavations, chartered gozzi with a skipper, and the coast to yourself for a day.
Three things that happen on this coast and nowhere else.
Cliff roads and good tomatoes exist all over the Mediterranean. A cave lit from underneath, a footpath a thousand feet above the sea, and a lemon the size of a grapefruit do not.
The Blue Grotto
The entrance is a metre high, so you lie flat in a rowing boat while the oarsman hauls on a chain and times the swell. Inside, sunlight comes up through the submerged mouth instead of down through the roof, and the whole cave reads electric blue. It shuts whenever the sea runs, which is decided that morning and by nobody you can argue with.
- 1Exclusive Capri Boat Tour and Optional Blue Grotto★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 3,170 reviews
- 2Capri Blue Grotto Small-Group Boat Day Tour From Sorrento★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 2,511 reviews
- 3Island Boat Tour with Blue Grotto Stop★★★★★★★★★★ 4.1 · 2,071 reviews
The Path of the Gods
The old mule track from Bomerano to Nocelle runs the ridge a thousand feet over the water, with Positano below and Capri sitting out on the horizon. Walk it downhill, west to east, starting early: there is no shade past ten and the finish is fifteen hundred steps down into Positano.
- 1Path of the Gods Guided Hike with Transfers★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 530 reviews
- 2Guided Day Hike on the Path of the Gods with Sorrento Transfer★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 265 reviews
- 3Path of the Gods Hiking Day Tour from Sorrento★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 110 reviews
The lemon terraces
The Sorrento lemon is a protected variety, grown under chestnut-pole pergolas on terraces cut into the hill, with a thick fragrant peel that is the whole point: limoncello is made from the skin and nothing else. The farms above the town press olives in the same yard, so a tasting usually turns into lunch.
- 1Sorrento Farm and Food Experience including Olive Oil, Limoncello, Wine tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 2,524 reviews
- 2Coast and Capri Boat Trip with Limoncello Tasting★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 2,037 reviews
- 3Pizza Lesson, Wine, and Limoncello at a Local Farm★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,513 reviews
Four bookings on this coast that will not wait.
Most of a week here can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on entry slots, sea states and bus timetables that take no interest in when your ferry docks.
- 01Exclusive Capri Boat Tour and Optional Blue GrottoThe cave only opens in a calm sea, and the call is made on the morning. Book a day with slack in it, not your last one.
- 02Entry Ticket and Guided Tour with an ArchaeologistEntry runs on timed slots with a cap on each. The early ones, the only cool ones, go first in summer.
- 03Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius with Lunch and Wine TastingThe crater path is a timed ticket and it closes in bad weather. The last ascent leaves well before the summit gate shuts.
- 04Island Boat Trip with GrottosEvery hydrofoil arrives in the same two hours. The boats that leave before them are the ones that sell out.
The boats stop before the coast does. Here is the day that still works.
A swell out of the west cancels the grotto, the island crossings and half the coast runs, sometimes at an hour’s notice. The answer is inland and under a roof: two Roman towns that do not care about the weather, a vineyard on volcanic soil, and a kitchen where somebody teaches you to fold gnocchi.
Gnocchi alla sorrentina, a mozzarella still warm, and wine grown on ash.
Vesuvius made the soil, which is why the tomatoes and the Lacryma Christi both taste like they do. Book the farm lunch for the middle of the day, the cooking lesson for the afternoon it rains, and the tasting for the day you have no ferry to catch.
By place — peninsula, islands and the bay
By kind of day — deck, ruin, kitchen or footpath
Pompeii, Capri, the coast villages, Vesuvius: the run almost everybody does from Sorrento.
The newest reviews from the coast.
The rest of the new ones →
Private Stress-Free Tour from Sorrento: Ischia Island & Tastings
Read our review →
Visit the Pompeii ruins from Salerno with Pizza Lunch
Read our review →
ARGILLARIUM EXPERIENCE – RITUS OTIUM (90 minutes)
Read our review →
Private Sorrento Sunset Cruise with Prosecco, Spritz & Limoncello
Read our review →