Day 8 - Arrival in Sorrento

March 18, 2019

Our next destination was Sorrento, which is about an hour south of Naples. We'd had a recommendation of a great Bed and Breakfast there from Margaret and Bill Roberts. Margaret was a co-worked at the City of Surrey, she's now retired. 

It was going to be a long travel day. First, we had to take a train from Florence through Rome and then on to Naples. We splurged and travelled first class, which gave us these benefits:

• we had larger seats in a sparsely populated car
• we got one shot of Espresso and some packaged biscuits between each major stop.

We were on a high speed train, I took this shot showing the maximum we achieved, not quite 300 KMH.

After a brief stop in Rome, the train carried on to Naples. We'd been warned about the Naples train station having a high incidence of pickpocket thefts, but the station was not crowded and we had no incidents. 

We did have trouble buying tickets for Sorrento, the ticket machine did not show any departure times for that day. We went to a Trenitalia agent and found out we had to use a different carrier, Circumvesuviana. There was quite a difference with this carrier; the cars were old and the train was quite full; but we got there.

We had these instructions from our B&B provider on what to do on arrival.

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Hello I’m Pascal of the Villa Monica B&B..:)

Here the informations to reach us when you arrive..:

Hello
How to reach us:
Without a car :
at your arrive to Sorrento call us and we pick up you.
0039 (Italian code) then xxxxxxxxxx (edited for privacy)
If you call with an Italian number no code.
If you don't have a phone go to the restaurant "il leone rosso" which is about 40 meters on the left far from the train station and ask them to call me...)

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Other than the biscuits on the train we hadn't eaten since breakfast, so we decided to go to the restaurant. It was a high end restaurant with very good food. We'd not spent much on food recently and splurged on dinner.

I had Ravioli ai porcini (Ravioli stuffed with cheese and wild mushrooms). This was one of the best meals on our entire trip.

Edith had the daily special, Swordfish.

After dining, we asked the waiter to call Pasquale as per his instructions. He showed up about 20 minutes later and drove us up a very narrow, winding road to his villa on the mountainside. The first thing we noticed was the spectacular view, looking down on Sorrento and the Gulf of Naples.

The dark mountain across the gulf is Mount Vesuvius. We'd be visiting the Pompeii site on our third day in Sorrento.

This view is a looking down into Sorrento.

After darkness fell, the view was even more spectacular.

Pasquale mentioned that he often referred his guests to a tour company that offered day trips to the Isle of Capri. We'd hoped to do something like that and were able to get on the next day's trip.

One last bonus was free wine on offer in the common room. We had to pay for Edith's beer, but the wine was always free. I really liked the one pictured below. According to Pasquale, it cost about 3 Euros per bottle. I checked and it's not available in BC. If it was, they'd charge $20 - $30 for it.

It had been a long day and we had a fairly early wake up call for tomorrow's boat trip.