Torre Annunziata

The pasta of Torre Annunziata was born of a river the ancients worshipped as a god: at the end of the sixteenth century Count Muzio Tuttavilla had the Sarno canalised to turn the mills, and everything started from there. At its height, just after the First World War, more than sixty mills and pasta factories worked here — they earned the town the title of capital of the white art — and some of the most awarded in the world are still going, Voiello, founded here in 1879, and Setaro. That same Sarno is today reckoned the most polluted watercourse in Europe, through illegal discharges and missing treatment: works to clean up its basin are under way.

Beneath the town sleeps a palace: the villa of Poppaea at Oplontis, a UNESCO site since 1997 together with Pompeii, keeps second-style frescoes among the finest ever found — and you often visit them almost alone, a step away from the Pompeian crowds. The town lies entirely in the red zone, the sector at greatest risk should Vesuvius wake, and stretches six kilometres between Capo Oncino and the mouth of the Sarno, facing the rock of Rovigliano, a turreted stack under which colonies of coral live. The beaches of black volcanic sand are a reminder of who commands the landscape. Here too is the military fuse works, which was the Bourbons' Royal Arms Factory. A dense, real stop, off the polished routes.