Sorrento

225 kilometers south of Rome you encounter La Campagna Felix, the Happy Land around the Bay of Naples and the Amalfi Coast.  Volcanoes abound in those parts, and from time to time one wakens to spray its ejecta on the countryside, ensuring fertile conditions for every good agricultural product.  Gifts of this happy corner of the world also include pizza, limoncello, Sophia Loren, and Naples, the pickpocket capital of the planet.  Come summer high season and people like us flock there by the tens of thousands to clot the streets and alleyways and beaches of such genuinely charming places as Capri and Positano and Pozzuoli and Sorrento.

Ah, sweet Sorrento.

This ancient town climbs steeply from beach to ridgetop, so its people have terraced it stepwise from bottom to top to create horizontal land for lemon trees, olive trees, and grapevines, all thriving shoulder to shoulder as they have done for centuries.  Swanky hotels and gift shops and restaurants now shoulder in among them to accommodate the summer hordes, and during the high season the population quintuples, smothering the attractive charm.  

Bummer.

So here’s a thought.  Visit Sorrento in February when the rest of the world is off vacation and the people you encounter in the plazas and byways actually live there.  No sunburned slouches in flip flops and tank tops.  No traffic jams to incinerate your patience.  No queues snaking out the door of the pizzeria.  Better yet, go on February 14, which we recognize as Valentines Day but the Sorrentini honor as the annual celebration of their patron and protector, Saint Antonini.

Antonini died 1400 years ago but is venerated to this day in gratitude for the deeds attributed to him: compelling a whale to regurgitate a child it had swallowed; saving the city from a Moorish invasion; freeing Sorrento from Spanish domination; repelling demon possession, cholera, and bubonic plague.  Mind you, few Italians attend mass any more, and if you witness someone thumbing through rosary beads, s/he is likely to be bent with age, so the traditions observed on St. Antonino’s day might move you.  At early morning the police barricade off the town center so the streets are  as free from automobiles as in olden times.  At ten, a launch in the harbor lofts a shell into the still air.  It’s BOOM signals the start of the procession.  The good people of Sorrento stand silent on the sidewalks of the main drag from the cathedral to the saint’s basilica.  Hundreds of solemn costumed representatives of the town’s catholic congregations and squads of squirming children process ahead of the saint’s effigy as it rides aloft on shoulders from church to church. When it is safely back home, the bishop ascends the pulpit to deliver a homily to the SRO crowd.

For these few sweet hours Sorrento sheds its come-hither veneer to disclose the underlying community of timeless tradition, piety, and veneration.

Sorrento shares latitude with Northern California, so leave your parka at home but maybe pack rain gear.

IN SEASON

OFF SEASON