Sorrento has a problem that works in its favour: it is a stopping-off point, the place people stay on their way to Capri or the Amalfi coast, and so the energy faces outward — at the ferries, the tour-company windows, the departures board. The town rewards the opposite. The old centre is small enough to cross in fifteen minutes but dense enough that a wrong turn still surprises; the streets inland from Corso Italia empty out almost entirely by 10am when the day-trippers board their boats. The gorge of the mills is the centrepiece — there is nothing else quite like it in southern Italy, a ruined medieval industry the town built a road over and then simply forgot, leaving the ferns and the silence to take over. The walk down to Marina Grande in the late afternoon, when the fishing boats are back and the light is horizontal, is when the town feels most like itself rather than like a postcard. Take the path rather than the road; it deposits you among the coloured houses without the switchbacks.