Piazza Tasso

About this place

The coffee tables of Piazza Tasso stand on a buried ravine. When Sorrento laid out its main square in 1866, part of the Vallone dei Mulini gorge was filled in and the valley's outlet to the sea was sealed, so the town's centre of gravity now sits on ground that was made rather than found. Before that the site was known as Largo del Castello, after an Aragonese fortress pulled down in 1843. The present name belongs to the poet Torquato Tasso, born here in 1544; his marble statue, credited by local sources to the sculptor Gennaro Calì, has stood in the square since 1870. Let us be straight with you: this is a square, not a sight. Everything on it that can be visited is used up in a few minutes — the yellow Baroque church of Santa Maria del Carmine with its single nave, and the statue of Saint Antoninus, the town's patron, at the far end. Give it a quarter of an hour in daylight and you have given it everything it asks for. Anyone who blocks out a daytime hour in their itinerary has been sold a bigger place than the one that exists. What it is really worth begins after sunset. In season — roughly April to late October — the centre closes to traffic from about 7.30pm until midnight, and the Corso Italia stretch is pedestrian all year anyway, so the street and its side lanes fuse into one long promenade and the square fills with Sorrentines before tourists: families out after dinner, ice cream, horse-drawn carriages, a friendly din that runs late. This is the Italian passeggiata in its original form — free, and worth going out of your way for once. It is the only reason we put the square on your list at all. Practically, the piazza is the knot every road in Sorrento is tied into, and you could not avoid it if you tried. Corso Italia runs east and west from it, Via San Cesareo slips off into the old town and its shops, Via Luigi De Maio drops down to Marina Piccola where the Capri ferries dock, and a few steps away on Via Fuorimura there is the railing you look over into the Valley of the Mills — looking is all there is, since the valley floor is private and closed to visitors. The ground is flat and fine for pushchairs and older walkers, though cars and carriages still cross the middle by day, so keep a hand on small children. For Muslim families: halal food in Sorrento is very limited, with only a handful of places advertising it, and we found no mosque in the town itself — the nearest prayer facilities are in Naples.