If you were to hand God a blank canvas and ask him to paint the Italian idyll, you would get something like Sorrento. Sitting astride cliffs that plunge down to the brilliant-blue Bay of Naples and at the gateway to the fabled Amalfi Coast, this glam coastal town has got it all going on–a historic center brimming with pastel-painted palazzi, flower-wreathed villas, and roads twisting vertiginously down to a marina where the irresistible tang of freshly grilled seafood hangs on the sea breeze. 

Whether you’re slow-touring the peninsula in search of a cliff-clasped cove or sipping an icy limoncello piazza-side as the lights glimmer, Sorrento is Italian romance in a nutshell. And it has long been this way: during the 18th- and 19th-century heyday of the Grand Tour, poets and writers like Goethe, Dickens, Lord Byron, and Keats were smitten. Read our first-time guide and get planning your trip and you soon will be, too.