Marina Piccola has served as Sorrento's fishing harbour since Roman colonists first anchored galleys beneath tufa cliffs in the first century BCE. The natural inlet, carved by millennia of wave action into the Sorrentine Peninsula's limestone base, offered shelter from Tyrrhenian squalls and direct access to coastal settlements east toward Positano and Amalfi. By the fifteenth century, the port had become a trading nexus for citrus, olive oil, and inlaid woodwork bound for Naples and beyond. Today the same stone quays dispatch passenger vessels along the thirty-kilometre coastline UNESCO inscribed in 1997 for its terraced cultivation and vernacular architecture. Sorrento boat tours to Amalfi Coast depart from Via Marina Piccola between 07:00 and 20:00 daily, threading through marine traffic that swells to over two hundred vessels on peak summer mornings. The route hugs vertical cliffs rising three hundred metres above the waterline, passing Li Galli archipelago — three limestone islets where Rudolf Nureyev maintained a villa until 1989 — before rounding Punta Campanella, the peninsula's southern tip. Positano appears first: six hundred pastel houses stacked on a forty-five-degree slope, their domed chiesa majolica tiles visible from two kilometres offshore. Amalfi lies thirteen kilometres beyond, its Duomo di Sant'Andrea façade — rebuilt in nineteenth-century Arab-Norman Revival style after the 1861 earthquake — dominating the harbour square. Operators run open-deck gozzi, traditional Sorrentine wooden boats with canvas awnings, and fibreglass launches seating twelve to thirty passengers. Most itineraries allocate ninety minutes in Positano and two hours in Amalfi, time calculated to allow the climb up Positano's three hundred twenty steps to Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta or exploration of Amalfi's medieval Arsenal, now a maritime museum. Departures before 09:00 avoid the midday flotilla when two dozen tour boats converge on Positano's single mooring buoy. The return leg typically includes swimming stops at secluded coves — Furore fjord or Conca dei Marini — where the seabed drops to fifteen metres and visibility reaches thirty in settled conditions. The coastal tour industry evolved from local fishermen supplementing income with passenger runs in the nineteen-sixties, when the Amalfi Drive's completion made the coast accessible by road but not comfortably so. The route remains the fastest way to traverse the coastline, cutting two-hour bus journeys to forty minutes at sea. Booking opens at Porto Turistico di Sorrento, the commercial marina adjacent to Marina Piccola, where a ten-euro landing fee per person grants mooring rights at destination ports. Operators include both family-run wooden-boat services and newer fleets with onboard bars and multilingual commentary systems.