Trips With James Roman

Spy Films To Thrill You: Traitor And The American

Some great films from the early 2000s feature known stars, great acting and storylines, excellent direction, and beautiful cinematography.

Are you looking for a couple of spy/thriller type movies that do not fit into the James Bond or Jason Borne genre. Maybe something that makes you think just a little before the action starts? Maybe something you did not see when the movie first came out but still is a really good movie? Well, I have a couple of great films from the early 2000’s that feature known stars, great acting and storylines, and excellent direction and beautiful cinematography.

First up is TRAITOR (2008) starring Don Cheadle and Guy Pierce. The movie is beautifully rendered by Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who also wrote the screenplay that is based on a story written by Steve Martin. Yes, Steve (Wild and Crazy Guy) Martin.

Rotten Tomatoes gave it a rating of 65% based on 169 reviews, and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it 3 stars out of 4 and wrote in his review, “The movie proceeds quickly, seems to know its subject matter, is fascinating in its portrait of the inner politics and structure of the terrorist group, and comes uncomfortably close to reality. But what holds it together is the Cheadle character.”

This is a terrorism spy thriller that is both intelligent and exciting. Featuring the always interesting Don Cheadle, one of my favorite actors (and in person, a really nice guy), as a former Sudanese American US soldier with a background in explosives who seems to have crossed over and joined a terrorist organization. He is the prime suspect as the bomb-maker in a string of global terror explosions aimed at civilians. Hot on his trail is an FBI agent played by Guy Pierce, who as the movie progresses starts to wonder what Cheadle’s true intentions are.

“Traitor” weaves a web of conspiracy and intrigue, crosses politics with thriller elements, and never quite answers its central question: In the war between good and evil, how many good people is it justifiable for the good guys to kill? Maybe that question has no answer. It is probably not “none.” That ambiguity works in the film’s favor. As Cheadle’s character (Samir) enlists on the American side and then is seen as a remarkably effective agent for terrorist jihadists, we are kept wondering where his true loyalties lie.

This is not a typical terrorism film where all Middle Easterners are inherently anti-American and evil. This is a movie that takes the time to examine the beliefs and motivations behind the people who commit terrorism and the roots of terrorism. It tries to give us a reason why some people do these terrible things, and by doing that the “villains” all of a sudden, become people not just caricatures. It gives a depth and understanding to these characters that is chilling, extremely disturbing, but crystal clear as to what their motivations are.

Another thing that I (and Roger Ebert) found interesting about the movie was the way it goes inside the terrorist organizations – to the people who carry out the day-to-day operations of such groups. This is not a movie about the James Bond type villains who have billions of dollars and want world domination, or to bring America to its knees in one big explosion. This is a film about the little guys who do the grunt work. Who do what they do out of belief or anger or need, not the desire for world conquest.

Shot on location in Toronto (posing as Chicago), Marseille, France, and Marrakesh, Morrocco, the scenery is a beautiful background to the fast-paced action. The actors are all excellent from Cheadle and Pierce, to Said Taghmaoui, who plays Omar, one of the grunts who believes in the cause, but you can see his individual pain each step of the way. The film also co-stars Jeff Daniels, Neal McDonough and Archie Panjabi. This is a particularly good movie!

You can find TRAITOR currently available to stream with a subscription on STARZ for $9.99 / month. You can buy or rent Traitor for as low as $1.99 to rent or $5.99 to buy on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube, and AMC on Demand.

THE AMERICAN (2010)

It was early September 2010, and all that summer I had seen clips for The American, a new movie starring George Clooney. It looked like a typical spy/action-adventure movie with chases, girls, guns, and an undefined evil. Yet what did we get instead of a James Bond/Jason Borne retread? We get a sparse, tightly controlled movie filled with silence, long takes, and a growing sense of dread.

The American was loosely based on a 1990 book called A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth. It was adapted for the screen by Rowan Joffe.’ It was marketed as a high action-adventure spy thriller and the reaction to the film from the audience was disappointment. What they got for their money was a slowly paced story of a hardened yet haunted assassin. This is a quiet movie, a thoughtful movie, a movie built on character, not plot. Ironically, The American is very European in feel and style. It is filmed for the most part in Italy, and cinematographer Martin Ruhe filled the movie with beautiful lingering shots of a lonely Italian countryside that seems as old as time itself. This timeless quality makes you almost imagine that you are about to see some Roman legion marching over the next hill off to conquer some far-off place.

We never know what George Clooney’s character did or why anyone is after him, but from the first minute of the film, a chase is on. George’s character, Jack, is fleeing for his life from a group of Swedish hitmen. Yet the pace of the movie or this chase is slow and unhurried. Instead of watching the wild chases and unending action as spies trying to kill other spies for world domination or getting revenge for passed deeds, we descend into the life and mind of a skilled killer, an American version of a samurai warrior. Stoic, impervious and expert, with a focus so narrow it is defined only by his skills and his master.

The tale is straightforward, but many questions remain unanswered even at the end of the movie, but they are not really germane to the core story. The movie opens on a snow-covered field in Sweden. Jack and his current lover/friend are walking through the snow when shots ring out. In short order, Jack kills two unknown men out to kill him plus his completely innocent lady friend for no other reason than she happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. With fewer than 10 lines of dialog we learn that Jack is a skilled and ruthless killer, who will do anything necessary to stay alive. Who and why is Jack being hunted we never learn, but we get swept up in the chase as he flees for his life from the unknown “Swedes.”

We next find him getting off a train in Rome and arranging a meeting with the mysterious Pavel (Johan Leysen). Pavel is his handler/boss/agent/manager? It is never quite clear what the relationship is, or who Pavel, and by extension who Jack work for. Are they CIA, MI-5, free-lancers? This we never know. Yet it is clear that Jack works for Pavel or serves him, because he never questions Pavel’s orders (Just like a samurai following orders from his master). Even when every fiber of his being tells him that Pavel is setting him up.

I won’t give you the whole plot here – I hate that by reviewers that never really review. They just retell you the story. So why see the movie?

Let just say that this is a wonderful movie. The director is Anton Corbijn, who shot the bio pic Control (2007), the story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, who was a suicide at age 23. There is not a wrong shot. Every performance is tightly controlled. Clooney is in complete command of his effect. This is a wonderfully shot study of the loneliness of a bad man searching for redemption and a way out of the incredibly sad and terrible life he has created for himself.

For me one of the best movies of that year 2010.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating 66% based on 224 reviews. The website’s review states: “As beautifully shot as it is emotionally restrained, The American is an unusually divisive spy thriller—and one that rests on an unusually subdued performance from George Clooney.” Roger Ebert gave it 4 out of 4 stars saying, “Here is a gripping film with the focus of a Japanese drama. It is so rare to see a film this carefully crafted.” Leonard Maltin called it a “slowly paced, European-style mood piece, short on dialogue and action and long on atmosphere.”

Couple of interesting facts about the film are that the director purposely paid homage to the American spaghetti western in many of his scenes. In one scene the Sergio Leone film Once Upon the Time in The West plays on a TV set in the background while George Clooney eats alone in a restaurant. Also, whole chunks of dialogue that are spoken between Clooney and his prostitute lover, Clara, are lifted verbatim from Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul.

You can find The American on Amazon Prime, Microsoft Store, iTunes, Vudu and Apple TV renting for 3.99 or to buy at 14.99. It is also available on Google Play and YouTube, but no pricing was available.

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In Praise of Francis Ford Coppola

My Four Days on the Set of Megalopolis

By Jane Doe, Guest Author

(Ms. Jane Doe is an actress who worked on the movie Megalopolis as a background artist. She is using a fake name because she’s legally obligated not to speak about the film. She had signed an NDA to that effect, but her article was so compelling that we decided to publish it. We have signed an NDA with her not to reveal her name and claim our First Amendment rights of free speech to publish this article.)

For four days, I sat on the movie set of Megalopolis, an upcoming American science fiction epic by director/producer/screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola and watched as the master filmmaker slowly and meticulously made his movie. Coppola is the director of such amazing award-winning movies as the Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation and other movies like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Outsiders and The Rainmaker. He has also served as the producer of over 50+ movies through his American Zoetrope production company. The simple premise of Megalopolis is that in a New York City set sometime in the future and with a culture very much based on early Rome, a young woman is divided between loyalties to her father, who has a classical view of society, and her lover, who is more progressive and ready for the new future. Of course, the film has many much deeper plot points like an autocratic society, democracy versus a dictatorship much like early Rome itself, and morality and what is moral in a strict futuristic society.

Rumors and speculation about Megalopolis which is being shot in Atlanta and based at Trilith Studios have been swirling since the film began its five-month shoot in November of 2022. Stories of budget overruns, mass staff and actor defections, and just general disfunction as theories began to spread that Francis maybe was too old (84) to make another movie or that he just did not understand how to make a film with all the modern technology available now.

Francis Ford Coppola started writing Megalopolis in the 1980s and has been trying to get the movie made since that time. He came close to production in early 2001 when he recorded roughly 30 hours of second-unit footage of New York City, but when the tragedy of 9/11 happened the film was placed on indefinite hold. By 2007 Coppola publicly announced that the film would never be made. Yet in 2019 just before the pandemic it was announced that Coppola was going to try and make the movie. However, since he had not had a money-making movie in several years he could not find a studio that would finance what would be a multimillion dollar science fiction epic.

Coppola is not only a world-famous filmmaker but he’s also a very shrewd and successful businessman. His empire includes several wineries including Coppola vineyards, magazines, restaurants and hotels, cannabis, and online activities. In 2021 Coppola sold several of his wineries and when he could find no one to finance his film, he announced that he would self-finance the movie himself. At the start of production, the budget was set at $120 million and by January 2023 the reported overruns had cost the film an added $30 million. The film was originally to be shot using OSVP technology also known as The Volume. This is a system where a set is surrounded by 40-foot-high LED panels on which backgrounds and scenes and locations can be projected making that your scenery. This technology has been used in movies produced by Marvel and Star Wars. However, the technology of this system is extremely costly, and the budget quickly ballooned. Then Coppola and his team decided to pivot to a less costly and more traditional green screen approach.

I was very excited when I was cast as a wedding guest in an opulent scene that required about 300 background artists. I was going to get a chance to see Francis Ford Coppola directing up close and to see if the rumors about the film’s dysfunction and his decline were either true or false.

Most background fittings usually take 30 to 45 minutes tops, mine took over 4 hours. I was astonished at the number of costumes that I saw that took up an entire soundstage and the attention to detail on each costume. It quickly became clear why the costumes were so elaborate. Four-time Oscar winner, Milena Canonero was the costume designer and her staff was painstakingly fussy over each and every item. The style of the film costumes, hair, and sets might be called “modern Roman”. All our hair and gowns were done up in styles that would resemble what wealthy women wore during Roman times. Each morning after we got dressed in our lavish costumes, our hair and makeup took about an hour each day for each person. My hair alone took over an hour as my stylist pinned my long blond hair up, adding hair pieces and finally a fake diamond tiara that gave me a headache it weighed so much. The elaborate makeup took another 30 minutes. Multiple that by about 100 or more women and you can see how long it took for just background to get ready.

The first day that I reported for shooting our location was Gas South Arena in Duluth, GA which was being used as a facsimile for Madison Square Garden. They had covered the entire floor of the auditorium in a thick layer of red dirt and on that placed three rings that gave it a circus atmosphere. That day we watched a chariot race, and male and female wrestlers perform in each one of the three rings. My first impressions of Mr. Coppola when he finally appeared on set surrounded by his massive crew and Roman, his son who is a cinematographer/director was that he was old and a little disorganized. Yet as I listened to background artists who have been working on the film since its beginning, it appeared that the overtime that it took to get the OSPV LED screens to work correctly was where much of the budget overruns came from. The other rumor was that many of his star actors came to set without knowing their lines. With great interest I listened to one background person who had been part of this scene with at least ten of the major stars for over a week and what had happened. The plan appeared to be for Mr. Coppola to spend two or three days filming this complex scene. Yet none of the actors seemed to know their lines and when they tried to rehearse, it just became obvious that this would not work. Instead, Francis decided to spend an entire day focused on each individual actor to get the different takes and styles he felt he needed. This expanded the time from two or three days to 10 days all with star actors on the clock getting paid. It seemed it was recurring situations like this that had started to cause budget overruns.

By the time I got to set, they had corrected that situation by ending each day after 12 hours. They had also gone to the green screens exclusively. What people forget about Francis Ford Coppola is that he is an improvisational director. Yes, he is done gigantic epics like Apocalypse Now and supposedly that ran into all kinds of budget overruns and time problems. However, early in his career Coppola was a filmmaker who made small personal films and was very improvisational in how he shot them. Sometimes he would change things at a moment’s notice. He brought that style to Megalopolis, and it was obvious that it was frustrating for the crew and perhaps even the cast. It’s hard to be improvisational when your crew is over 100 people, and you have four cameras going including a crane camera but somehow that’s what he managed to do.

On our second day we reported to the same location and the three rings of the circus were gone and replaced with a giant platform on which a Greek style temple had been built. That day we sat in the bleachers that posed for Madison Square Garden again and watched a parade of scantily dressed women walk around the stadium. Then four female aerial artists and Grace Vanderwaal, American singer, and actress, who plays one of the leads performed for about three or four hours to recorded dance music and vocals by Vanderwaal. After the scene was done the way that it was written, Coppola would begin to ask for changes: move the camera here, can you do the scene this way and then on the next take he would change it again. He might move a camera to another position or ask the crane to come in a different way or ask the dance number to change. With the crew this large it took time to make all these changes and it might seem confusing to somebody who had not been on the set for 24 hours over two days but it became apparent he was in complete control and knew exactly what was going on. They had a riot scene planned at the end of the dance section, and watching the stunt coordinator and Coppola add layer upon layer to the fight scenes was so interesting.

On top of that Francis is an old school gentleman. We never heard him curse or raise his voice. Each day he was dressed in a suit and was wonderfully nice and complementary to everyone and treated us with great dignity. Because the set was so big and he is 84 years old, he used a microphone to talk to everybody. The first day I was on set people talked over Francis and that did create confusion for people. That did not happen on the second day.

When I returned a week later to complete this wedding scene we were now at Trilith Studios and our numbers have been reduced down to about 100. To get us in the mood for what we were going to be working on that day, Coppola showed a 5 minute clip of what we had shot the week before with Grace Vanderwaal and the aerialists It was amazing. The color correction, the editing, how the scene flowed together with this beautiful song sung by Grace was stunning. It’s not often on a film set that actors, background, and entire crew members stop to applaud a little vignette but that’s what happened. That day we watched parades of people walk by with us applauding for them. The group passing by included Dustin Hoffman, Talia Shire and Giancarlo Esposito. I almost got bumped up to have a line with Talia Shire unfortunately it went to someone else, but for a few moments I thought I was going to have a line in a Francis Ford Coppola movie.

I don’t know if this movie will be a success. I don’t know if the movie will be good or if it will make any money. All I know on those four days that I sat there and watched Mr. Coppola interact with his crew and his cast and all the background was a man who still knows what he’s doing and is in command of his craft. Perhaps chaos is part of his creative process, but it’s helped him make three of the greatest movies ever made and served him well through the rest of his career. If that little 5 minute sequence that I saw is any indication, Megalopolis is going to be beautiful and amazing. Thank you, Mr. Coppola. It was an awesome four days watching you work.

Positano, Italy: City on a Cliff

Before I start my account about Positano, I owe my subscribers a bit of an apology. I promised this story to you almost three months ago and yet here it is the first time you’ve heard from me since August. My professional life has gotten very busy recently but that’s not an excuse. I just got lazy. Between directing a show, pre-production for a film, some acting jobs and being asked to write a film for a producer here in Atlanta, I just kept saying I’ll do the Positano story tomorrow. And of course I’m just getting to it now. So please pardon me and expect a lot more articles on Trips With James in the coming weeks.

Positano is the first village that you come to as you leave Sorrento, Italy on the Naples side of the Amalfi coast. It can be reached by bus along the cliffs, or you can take ferries from Naples and Sorrento to reach it by sea. Positano is a layer cake of houses and shops and churches built on a cliff side that reaches all the way down to the Bay of Naples.

The photographs and the short film that are part of this article describe much better than I can in words how beautiful and colorful Positano is. There’s one highway that comes into Positano and connects you with the rest of the Amalfi coast, and there is one road that goes through the village all the way down to the shoreline. Yet Positano is a city of steps and stairways that lead in all directions as you walk through the village. These steps and stairways and paths lead to plazas, elegant shops, beautiful homes, small churches, large cathedrals and everywhere restaurants. Each one of these places has a magnificent view of the Bay of Naples.

I have two brief tales of things that happened to me as I entered Positano. As some of you who have read this blog before know I am scared of heights. Not ones made by nature, but ones made by man himself. I am perfectly fine standing on a cliff or mountain but flying in an airplane or riding over a high bridge scare me stupid. Taking the bus from Sorrento towards Positano, I had climbed on board and sat on right side of the coach. The Italian roads around the Amalfi coast are very narrow but the bus drivers speed around those corners and curves like it’s the Indianapolis 500. To get from Sorrento to Positano you have to cross over a mountain and come down the other side and the views are incredible, but you are literally traveling on a road that is suspended over the ocean anywhere from 500 to 1000 feet above the Bay of Naples with all the views on my side of the bus. There was literally nothing next to us. We were completely supported on this tiny narrow road by man-made construction. There had never been a road there before and there really should not be a road there now. It was breathtakingly beautiful and incredibly scary as we whipped around those corners in this 30-foot bus.

As we arrived in the village an incident that took place was right out of any classic Italian genre comedy. What took place was so cliché that you almost would not believe that it happened, but it actually did. As I stated before the highway is very narrow and in the villages people actually park on both sides of the highway in many places so there’s only enough room for one car to get through one at a time, but Italians don’t wait for anybody they just keep going. As we pulled into the village there was a small pickup truck in front of our bus traveling in the same direction and coming from the opposite way was a very large Mercedes-Benz. They both arrived at the same place at the same time and neither one of them would move out of the way for the other. What ensued was 10 minutes of Italian drivers standing in the middle of the road screaming at each other and waving their hands around in that secret language of Italian hand gestures that only they understand. Our bus driver also got involved as he got out of the bus twice and went over to the group of screaming Italian men. He proceeded to yell and scream while jumping up and down a bit and then came back to the bus. With the cars stacking up behind us on the busy coastal road, drivers from 5, 6, 7 cars away would get out come to join the loud discussion and then walk back to their cars shaking their heads. Not knowing the language, I could only guess what the argument was about. It seemed that the driver of the Mercedes-Benz, a very elegantly dressed older man, seemed concerned that his Mercedes would get scratched by the pickup truck. The driver of the truck didn’t care and that seemed to be the main concern. Finally after 10 minutes of this comedy of errors in Italian, the elegantly dressed man got back in his Mercedes and actually could drive past the pickup truck. There had been really no reason for this entire kerfuffle to take place, but it was exciting to see that the cliches that you think happen in other countries like Italian drivers screaming at each other in the middle of a road actually do take place. No one pulled a gun, no one threw a punch, no one tried to stab anybody else, there was just a lot of yelling and screaming and gesticulating about who was supposed to go first or get out of the way.

It was a bright, clear and warm November day as I took my time wandering through Positano down staircases, across plazas, entering shops and the large cathedral there as I made my way down towards the shoreline. Arriving at the shore of the Bay of Naples, I turned around and realized what an amazing feat of architecture this was. It was a layer cake of colorful houses and shops, churches and plazas that are all built on top of each other. Places where people live and work and shop and eat and live their lives. It is incredible to behold, yet you wonder who was the first person to decide that we could build an entire village on a side of a cliff?

At the bottom of the cliff, the shoreline was filled with expensive eateries and restaurants that serve fresh seafood and amazing Italian pastas and wines. After lunch, of course, it took me a bit longer to go up the staircases to the road then to come down them. I almost missed the bus back to Sorrento because while there is a bus schedule it’s a little bit flexible in an Italian way. Most of these villages don’t have a bus station there’s just a place where people gather and if you miss the bus you may be there for another hour or so before one returns.

Positano is beautiful, colorful, and certainly worth the visit.

A Day in Positano, Italy: A Short Film

A short travel log about Positano, Italy

Positano (Campanian: Pasitano) is a village and comune on the Amalfi Coast (Province of Salerno), in Campania, Italy, mainly in an enclave in the hills leading down to the coast.

A Day in Positano, Italy

TRANSPORTATION TO POSITANO:

Positano can be reached by the SS163 Amalfitana national road, or by the SP425 provincial road. The nearest airports are the Napoli-Capodichino (NAP) and the Salerno-Pontecagnano Airport (QSR) and they have shuttle buses to destinations across the Amalfi Coast, including Positano. Ferries link Positano to other towns including Capri, Naples, Salerno, and Sorrento for transportation. The Sita bus links Positano to Amalfi and Sorrento.

Next Blog will be about Positano!

Film directed and edited by James Carey. All photos are by James Carey. Sources for the information are from Wikipedia and journals of James Carey. The film and this blog are copyrighted by CareyOn,LLC 2022.

Sorrento, Italy: Gateway to the Amalfi Coast

Sorrento is an ancient town on the Bay of Naples in southern Italy that dates from the 8th century BC. Sorrento is one of two towns that serve as gateways to the Amalfi Coast. Obviously, one is Sorento on the western side and Salerno on the east. Both of these towns are relatively small. Sorrento had a population of 17,000 in 2007, but if you are traveling by car or bus they’re the only ways to get to the Amalfi Coast. The only other way would be to come in by sea on a ferry or private boat.

From the cliffs surrounding Sorrento you can see Mt. Vesuvius which exploded and buried the city of Pompeii in tons of ash and lava in 79 AD. To the north directly across the bay is Naples the largest cosmopolitan city in the area and to the West is the famous island of Capri.

Sorrento has been a famous tourist destination since the 1700’s and before. Such famous people as Lord Byron, Frederick Nietzsche, Goethe, Keats, Henrik Ibsen, and many other famous people have either lived in or visited Sorrento through the years. Pizza and Neapolitan ice cream are two of the famous food items that supposedly were created in the area. Neapolitan was the original language/dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the area.

While people have been living around the area for almost 3000 years, legend has it that Sorrento was founded by the grandson of Ulysses and Circe, both figures from Greek mythology. It is probably certain that at one time it was a Greek colony or fishing village as its harbor is beautiful and safe, and the oldest archway that leads from the beach up the cliffs towards the city above was built by the ancient Greeks. The village soon came under the control of the Romans as their empire grew and its Roman name was Surrentum.

The other legend that dominates Sorrento’s history are the Sirens, also a famous staple of Greek and Roman mythology. The Sirens were three dangerous mermaid-like creatures who took up residence near Punta Campanella and sang such beautiful songs that they enchanted the sailors on passing ships to wreck their ships on the rocks in the surrounding waters. Even the legendary Ulysses had to figure out a way to resist the deadly song of the Sirens.

As I left Lake Como in northern Italy, I traveled by train through Milano to Naples. The train ride took about 7 hours as I boarded a Eurostar high speed train. Once arriving in Naples at the main Naples train terminal, I boarded a local tram at the same station and after about 10 stops I found myself at the Sorrento train station. Sorrento has no hostels; it only has local hotels or Airbnbs. I chose a small hotel about two blocks from the train station that actually put me right in the middle of the town.

The center of Sorrento, Italy is quite compact, closed to the traffic and easy to explore on foot. Near my hotel was the Piazza Tasso, Sorrento’s main piazza, the best place to catch an expresso or drink and people watch. Piazza Tasso isn’t a particularly historic square…it dates back only about a century. It was built above the gorge which was once home to a number of mills. In the 1800’s, instead of cafés and shops, you would have seen local women hand-washing their laundry in the stream which ran from the hills behind down to the sea below. If you look down from the Piazza, you can still see the gorge known as the Valley of the Mills and, at the bottom, a number of abandoned mills which were powered by the force of the rushing water; unfortunately, the mills are closed to visitors.

The main thoroughfare off the Piazza is Corso Italia lined with fashionable shops, boutiques and the eateries and cafes where both the tourists and the locals eat. While there are some cars and Vespa’s that occasional use the walkway, it’s mostly a pedestrian walkway where at night Italian families and tourists stroll up and down looking in windows, drink espresso in the cafes, smoke cigarettes and talk to each other about family, Europeans football, the weather or Italian politics.

The town is filled with back alleys and small streets and winding walkways that lead off of the Corso Italia toward the cliffs above the Bay. Here you will pass tourist shops, art galleries, more restaurants, chapels and cathedrals. It’s very easy to get lost in this rabbit warren of small back alleyways between the main drag and the cliffs. Most of the town lies on the cliffs above the Bay. As you near the cliffs you will find a few walkways that lead down the face of the cliffs to the beach and Marina below past buildings that have been there for more than a few hundred years. It is an old town with its own history and its own culture and its own way of doing things, and it’s delightful.

One of the most famous products that Sorrento produces is limoncello, their famous liqueur made from lemon rinds, water, sugar and alcohol. The lemon groves are throughout the town itself. There were two of them directly across the street from the hotel that I checked into, and you can find them everywhere in the town where they grow their own lemons and then they’ll sell you the limoncello right there.

Lemon grove right in the town, fruit not ripe yet.

I found Sorrento to be an extremely cordial town. Maybe it’s because they’ve been dealing with tourists for over 500 years or it’s just the small-town feel. While I was traveling by myself I spent five days based in Sorrento as I traveled around the area, and I totally enjoyed my entire time there, and given the opportunity I would go back in a second.

Plus I felt it was a perfect place to explore at least most of the Amalfi Coast without having to be on the coast. You can reach almost any of the small towns along the coast by bus which can be a harrowing experience as they travel at high speeds along the cliffs high above the Bay, making you feel sometimes like there is literally nothing underneath you. Or you come in by ferry or hydrofoil from either Sorento or Salerno. Each one of the separate villages along the Amalfi Coast have their own different feel and thing for which they are famous. You can find books and articles and travel blogs about what each one of those towns specialize in whether it’s their beach, food or their party or family atmosphere.

If you’re looking for a slightly larger town then most of those small villages along the coast that has plenty of places to eat and a lot of things to do not only for kids but also adults, Sorrento is perfect place.