Explore Sorrento

Piazza Tasso is the main square of Sorrento, named after the poet Torquato Tasso, who was born in the town in 1544. Monuments to Tasso and to Saint Antoninus, the patron saint, stand in it, the yellow Baroque Church of the Carmine faces it, and the shopping street Via San Cesareo leads off it to the west.

Sorrento Cathedral, dedicated to Saints Philip and James, is the seat of the Archbishop of Sorrento-Castellammare di Stabia. Rebuilt in 1573 after a Turkish raid and given its Baroque interior in the early 18th century, it has a neo-Gothic façade of 1924, a bell tower on a Roman base and 11th-century doors from Constantinople.

Museum Correale occupies the villa of the Correale counts of Terranova in Sorrento, left to the town by the brothers Alfredo and Pompeo Correale. It shows Neapolitan paintings of the 17th to 19th centuries, Capodimonte and Sèvres porcelain, Murano glass, clocks, inlaid furniture and archaeological finds, with a citrus garden and a terrace over the Gulf of Naples.

Piazza Umberto I, usually called La Piazzetta, is the main square of the town of Capri. It is framed by the clock tower, the steps of the church of Santo Stefano and the former bishop's residence, now the town hall, and café tables have filled it since the 1930s. The funicular from Marina Grande stops beside it.

The Certosa di San Giacomo is a Carthusian monastery on Capri, founded in 1371 by Count Giacomo Arcucci, secretary to Queen Joan I of Naples, on land she gave him. Sacked by pirates in the 16th century and enlarged afterwards, it now holds a museum of paintings by Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, two cloisters and a garden above Marina Piccola.

The Gardens of Augustus are terraced municipal gardens in the town of Capri, laid out in the early 20th century by the German industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp and called the Krupp Gardens until 1918. Flower beds and pines frame views of Monte Solaro, Marina Piccola and the Faraglioni rocks; a 1968 monument to Lenin by Giacomo Manzù stands in the gardens.

Villa San Michele is the house and garden built in the late 19th century by the Swedish physician and writer Axel Munthe in Anacapri, at the top of the Phoenician Steps, 327 metres above the sea. Munthe furnished it with Roman and Egyptian antiquities, including a sphinx on the parapet, and described it in The Story of San Michele (1929). It later passed to the Swedish state.