Which is further from Sorrento: Positano, nine kilometres east, or Naples, twenty-six across the water?
The region. The whole bay, the Phlegraean shore to the west, and the first towns beyond the mountains. Tap a mark to pin it; a second compares.
The water is shaded by hours from the landing: the lighter, the nearer.
16 of 16 places reachable.
Brackets of one-way travel time, for the sailing season and villa household. Marks are coloured on a continuous ramp by days; the brackets are where the list draws its lines.
The town, its fields and its own headlands. Back for the midday meal.
Out and back between dawn and dusk. A visit, not a journey.
Sleep there, come back tomorrow. Most of the bay.
Business, a festival, a relative. Where the roads start to compete with the water.
Rome, and with the wind behind you the far side of the sea.
The sea world, in season only. Returns can take several times as long.
The bay is a road and the mountain behind the town is a wall. Reach runs north-west across the water and barely moves to the south or east; the empty quarter on every chart is open sea.
The sea was open from late May to mid-September and marginal either side: in the shoulder months boats and coasters ran, and nobody committed a laden merchantman to open water. From mid-November it was shut. With the sea shut the islands drop off and the bay towns survive by the long walk round the shore; Nuceria and Capua barely notice.
A pack slows a walker a little and a mule-load a lot; a cargo of amphorae cannot go over a mule track at all. None of it slows a boat. Tolerance for discomfort decides between routes and changes nothing else: the time shown is that of the route taken. A villa household can hire a boat and buy passage on a ship; a fishing family has its own boat and works a passage; a tenant walks or waits for a lift, and under that setting Naples costs a day and a half.
The eruption of 79 pushed the shore out by half a kilometre at Herculaneum and by a kilometre along the Sarno plain, and the Tiber has since carried Ostia three kilometres inland. The chart draws the earlier line, so the towns sit on the water they had. Where a town's landing was somewhere else (Marina Grande below Capri, the river port below Pompeii, the landing below Surrentum), it is marked.