Explore the vast range of titles available.

My online research took me to \"The Guide to Cooking Schools,\" which led me to the Mami Camilla Cooking School and Bed and Breakfast, which specializes in Neapolitan and Mediterranean cuisine. It is owned and operated by the Longo family, which holds classes in its home in the Sorrento suburb of Sant' Agnello. Compared with other schools, Mami Camilla seemed to offer more intensive training, flexibility in class schedules and more for my money. Mami Camilla, 4 Via Cocumella, Sant' Agnello di Sorrento, 80065, Naples, Italy; 011-39-081-878-20-67, www.mamicamilla.com. The school has custom, flexible cooking classes, from single classes to monthlong courses with internships in local restaurants. It also offers escorted trips to local olive-oil and cheese factories and a winery, as well as half-day trips to Naples and other surrounding cities and the island of Capri. The school also functions as a restaurant, giving students the opportunity to experience cooking at a professional level. I paid $1,789 for my intensive two-week course, room, breakfast, dinner and cooking classes. (Prices may vary depending upon season.) You may also book private classes with the chef for $174. One-day group sessions are $125. MAP: Sorrento, Italy; CREDIT: Los Angeles Times; STIRS THE SENSES: With its ocean views and olive groves, Sorrento provides a postcard setting in which to learn about Mediterranean cooking.; PHOTOGRAPHER: Pam Lehnert; TO WHET THE APPETITE: Calamari sauteed in olive oil, garlic and tomatoes, as prepared by Mami Camilla students.; PHOTOGRAPHER: Pam Lehnert; LEARNING HER LESSON: After topping it with basil, Jill Iacono cuts her pizza under the watchful eye of chef [Biagio Longo].; PHOTOGRAPHER: [Marjorie Mauriello Baker]

The Amalfi Coast, in the Campania region, the ankle of Italy's famous boot, stretches 43 miles from Sorrento on the Bay of Naples to Salerno on a gulf bearing its name. With a Greco-Roman heritage dating to 1000 BC, about 250 years before the founding of Rome, this stretch of shoreline abounds in rugged natural beauty and picturesque cliffside villages, with dwellings in shades of spice, sky, and sea, amid fragrant expanses of olive groves and lemon trees. Sorrento is an ideal scenic base from which to rest, relax, and explore. Another day trip from Sorrento worth making is Herculaneum. Said to have been founded by Hercules himself, this archeological site is about a 50-minute drive from Marina Piccola in Sorrento. Positano is one of several villages near Sorrento renowned for their charm. Home of American author John Steinbeck in the 1950s, it is a 40-minute drive south from Sorrento along high winding roads overlooking the sea. Once in \"downtown\" Positano, follow a stone lane down toward the water that is lined with tiny boutiques selling touristy junk, art, and fine linen. At the bottom of the lane are several cafes and restaurants and the public beach. Like many Italian beaches on this coast, it is pebbly but the water is pure, clean, and a beautiful aquamarine.

The coast road south out of Sorrento leads on to some of the other glittering cast of the Costa Amalfitana: Positano, Amalfi and Ravello. The swell of the waves visible from my partner's position in the passenger seat reflects the delicate state of our stomachs as the tiny hatchback negotiates the seemingly never-ending succession of bends that slow our progress. By half an hour after midday, we're still several kilometres from Positano, but the dome of Santa Maria dell' Assunta and the town's pastel-coloured houses, framed by the mountains and rising steeply away from the sea, are visible in the distance. Then, around 1pm, we're descending the narrow streets and in to the welcoming embrace of one of the numerous parking consortiums that do brisk business finding a temporary home for your four wheels. The onset of evening sees us make our way out of the hotel and down the path flanked by orange and lemon trees and into the bustle of Piazza Tasso. The statue of Sant' Antonio Abate, encircled only hours before by a succession of tourist buses, stands contemplating the square that is now ringed by restaurants and bars servicing the northern Europeans that are drawn to Sorrento in their thousands at this time of year. We head south into the old town, in search of a quiet meal. The area is a maze of shops offering both fresh and ceramic lemons of all shapes and sizes, attesting to the region's abundance of citrus fruit. A great deal of the annual crop goes in to the manufacture of limoncello liqueur, bottles of which can be yours for however many euros the individual shopkeeper believes he can safely draw from the sea of tourist bumbags populating the area at all times of the day. If you've never tasted limoncello, don't. Of course, some may believe it to be the height of Amalfitana sophistication, something to be savoured on nights at home with the neighbours as you regale them with stories of how you will soon be setting up home in southern Italy. To me, it tastes like nothing less than an over-enthusiastic reduction of a Bacardi Breezer. Believe me, it'll take more than one bottle of mineral water to remove its cloying consistency from your palate.

In the Campania region (southern Italy), sloping pyroclastic surfaces in partially saturated conditions are frequently affected by flow-like landslides and shallow slip. In this context, safeguarding human life is entrusted to early warning systems (EWSs), typically based on empirical precipitation intensity-duration thresholds that may suffer from missed and false alarms. Indeed, the consequences of heavy rainfall depend on the hydraulic conditions in the soil before the rainstorm. If this aspect is neglected, precipitation intensity-duration thresholds can fail. However, although the current hydraulic condition in the soil is a discriminating factor, it is rarely measured and taken into account. In this regard, the present study focuses on the assessment of the role of the groundwater conditions for the initiation of shallow landslides, and it may be the first step towards the implementation of an innovative early warning system. At this aim, a numerical approach to reproduce the current hydraulic condition in the slope is presented. This study is based on the back-analysis of two debris flows that occurred in the Campania region by means of uncoupled hydromechanical numerical modelling. The stratigraphy and hydromechanical characteristics of the soil layers are known due to surveys and investigations carried out at an experimental test site set up a few kilometres from the two debris flows that occurred. The results show that in the slopes examined, the hydraulic state in the soil before landslide triggering was correctly reproduced through an infiltration analysis starting a few months before, in which rainfall recorded on site was imposed as an entering flow at ground level. Moreover, it was shown that the water storage in the entire loose soil cover was an effective indicator of the average hydraulic state of the slope; more than local variables, such as matric suction and water content.

The mapping of landforms in the Gulf of Naples is fundamental to understanding the recent evolution of this perithyrrenian basin controlled by several systems of Quaternary faults and characterised by the presence of the Campi Flegrei and Somma Vesuvius volcanoes. In this paper a 1:85,000 map of the recent evolution of the Gulf of Naples coasts is presented. This cartographic product has been obtained using a compilation of previously published geoarchaeological coastal studies integrated with new field data. The morphogenetic map suggests a differential evolution of various coastal stretches over the past 2000 years driven not only by measured vertical ground movements and eustatic sea-level rise (of 1 m) but also by eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius, in particular the Plinian eruption of 79 AD and the subsequent reworking of it's products, as well as by the erosive action of the sea.

We analyzed a thrust fault system located in the western Sorrento Peninsula and Capri Island (southern Italy) where several mesoscale structures related to the main thrusts, such as Riedel shear planes, overturned folds, minor thrust and back-thrust faults, suggest a dominant northward tectonic transport. Major and minor thrust faults, generally characterized by a ramp-flat geometry, involved the Mesozoic Apennine carbonates, the Middle Miocene foredeep, and the unconformable thrust-top basin deposits. The biostratigraphic analysis of calcareous nannoplankton assemblages on the thrust-top basin sediments indicates an age not older than late Tortonian. We propose that this out-of-sequence thrusting stage was related to a regional tectonic event widespread in the entire southern Apennines, probably occurred in the Pliocene time simultaneously with the activity of deep-seated thrust faults that involved the buried carbonates of the Apulian platform. These out-of-sequence thrust faults, here referred to as “envelopment thrusts,” were enucleated in a lower structural level with respect to the allochthonous wedge, representing the W–E segments of large regional arcuate structures.

High-resolution seismoacoustic data represent a useful tool for the investigations of gas-charged sediments occurring beneath the seabed through the identification of the diagnostic intrasedimentary features associated with them. Acoustic blanking revealed shallow gas pockets in the seismostratigraphic units of the inner shelf off the Northern Cilento promontory. Six main seismostratigraphic units were recognized based on the geological interpretation of the seismic profiles. Large shallow gas pockets, reaching a lateral extension of 1 km, are concentrated at the depocenter of Late Pleistocene–Holocene marine sediments that are limited northwards by the Solofrone River mouth and southwards by the Licosa Cape promontory. A morphobathymetric interpretation, reported in a GIS environment, was constructed in order to show the main morphological lineaments and to link them with the acoustic anomalies interpreted through the Sub-bottom chirp profiles. A newly constructed workflow was assessed to perform data elaboration with Seismic Unix software by comparing and improving the seismic data of the previously processed profiles that used Seisprho software. The identification of these anomalies and the corresponding units from the offshore Cilento promontory represent a useful basis for an assessment of marine geohazards and could help to plan for the mitigation of geohazards in the Cilento region.

The Special Issue “Advances in Sedimentology and Coastal and Marine Geology” has collected significant research articles advancing the state of the art of the corresponding sub-disciplines [...]

Thick successions of Cretaceous carbonates in the southern Apennines of Italy are of great economic interest since they host important aquifers and huge hydrocarbon accumulations. The reservoir of the Val d’Agri and Tempa Rossa oilfields (in the subsurface of Basilicata) consists of Upper Cretaceous rudist-rich limestones passing downward into mid-Cretaceous dolomitized limestones of restricted platform facies. Upper Albian-Lower Cenomanian dolomitized carbonates exposed in the Sorrento Peninsula and in the Cilento Promontory, part of the Apennine Carbonate Platform, represent a good surface analogue for the lower part of the reservoir. They are composed of meter-thick beds of stratabound dolomite and shallowing-upward cycles of restricted platform limestones capped by silicified evaporites and marly levels. Field relations, petrography, and geochemistry implicate the reflux of penesaline waters as the most probable dolomitization process. High-frequency climatic variability between dry and wet phases can explain the formation of evaporites, which are coeval with karstic bauxites in other sectors of the southern Apennines. The dolomitized carbonates of the Sorrento Peninsula pass laterally into dolomitized breccias, which were the result of local tectonic collapse of the platform. This is further evidence of mid-Cretaceous syn-sedimentary tectonics that in other areas of the Adria passive margin contributed to the formation of intraplatform basins where source rocks accumulated.

We present a high-resolution bathymetric map of the Gulf of Naples (Italy), which is surrounded by the two main volcanic complexes of Mt. Somma-Vesuvius and Phlegrean Fields. The morphology is obtained from swath bathymetric in a Digital Terrain Model with a 5 m grid cell size. Bathymetric data display the main seafloor morphologies with a resolution never obtained before. These morphologies include the Ammontatura and Dohrn Canyons, the Penta Palummo, Nisida, Miseno and Banco della Montagna banks, and the bathymetric features of the submerged sector of the Somma-Vesuvius volcano. Overall, a prevailing volcanic nature characterizes the seafloor morphologies located in the northern sector, while the southern one is dominated by sedimentary features. The Final Map could be useful for the evaluation of the volcano-related hazards in the area.