In the middle of Sorrento, five minutes from the B&B, the town splits open into a deep gorge, and inside it sits a ruin swallowed by vegetation. You look down from the balustrade on via Fuorimura, and the scale seems wrong: a piece of tropical forest dropped into the urban fabric.
How it formed
The valley is a geological fracture in the tufa bank, opened by an eruption of the Campi Flegrei some thirty-five thousand years ago. Two springs ran along its floor, and that water is the reason for everything that followed.
What used to be down there
In the seventeenth century a flour mill was built at the bottom of the gorge — hence the valley's name. Beside it came a sawmill, cutting the wood for the marquetry workshops that made Sorrento famous, and a public washhouse where the women of the town came to do the laundry.
It was a small industrial district in the heart of the city, and it worked because the valley ran all the way down to the sea and the harbour at Marina Piccola.
Why it was abandoned
This story is often told badly, so it is worth being precise.
In 1866 Piazza Tasso was built, filling in part of the valley. That infill cut the gorge off from the sea and closed it in on itself.
It was not, however, the immediate end of the works. The isolation drove humidity on the valley floor up to around 80%, and with less available water and a microclimate that had become unliveable, the mills only stopped working in the early 1900s.
Nobody has gone down to work there since, and in a little over a century the vegetation has taken everything back: ferns, maidenhair and ficus grow out of the masonry, and the damp that drove the people out is exactly what makes them thrive.
How you visit
You look; you do not go in. The floor of the gorge is not open to the public and there is no authorised route down.
The viewpoint is the balustrade on via Fuorimura, a few steps from Piazza Tasso, and it is free. You lean over, look down and move on: five minutes.
Getting there from the B&B
Five minutes on foot, flat all the way, via Piazza Tasso.
Our advice
The best light is mid-morning, when the sun is high enough to reach the bottom. By late afternoon the gorge is already in shadow and photographs come out dark and flat.
In winter and after rain the green is at its most intense and there is often a veil of moisture hanging in the air: that is when the place is most striking.
It is the perfect stop to slot between two other things — a two-minute detour from Piazza Tasso, and one of the strangest sights in town.
Mill Valley