This Wednesday finds me far from desk and phone, walking the old Roman road down through the trees and to Cape Hercules and the villa that may have been built by one Pollius Felix. “What was that house, that land, before it delighted in your touch?” asked Pollius’s friend, the poet Statius. “You covered naked rock with a long pathway, and where once was just a dusty track now stands a lofty colonnade of painted columns.”

And now stands nothing, except one marble step, which I sit on and look over the bay of Naples to the amazing cloven bulk of Vesuvius, and allow myself a fantasy of one day retiring to a place like this, to make mosaics and hand-paint tiles. Three anglers cast their lines below me, to my right two cruise liners lie at anchor. I hear a bell, catch a voice on the warm breeze, the same breeze that blows the yellow daisies and ruffles the umbrella pines, make out a distant car horn on the road above. Felix indeed.

This was Daddy downtime on a Voyages Jules Verne tour, a break between coach excursions. I would never have come here if it wasn’t for Jules Verne, whose brochure I have always loved, with its Waterways of the Czars, Palaces of Kubla Khan, and In the Footsteps of Spinoza (or something).

Our base for a week was a hotel in Sorrento, the perfect hub for trips along the coast from Naples to Amalfi. The first morning we decided which excursions to sign up for (do we want to do Amalfi on Tuesday, or Positano on Thursday? We did both). Then took a short walk around the town guided by the rep Chris, who talked about the Turks “ransackaging” the area in the Middle Ages. Married to a local man and with her children in Sorrento schools, Chris knows about the walnut harvest, the history of the local olive oil, the tastes of the cheeses, the best place to find antipasto, and where to sample limoncello.

She also knows how to organise a tour. Instead of taking us over the ridge to the Amalfi coast by coach, and back the same way, we took the coach out, but returned by boat. It was mostly food talk on the first leg, and then a stop-over in Amalfi, from where the family took a taxi high up into Ravello, where the sea appears not silvery, but silver.

On the boat back it was jolly, the retired and the families listening to a commentary that took us through the celebrity moments on the vertiginous coast: Zeffirelli’s seaside house, Sophia Loren’s nuptial hide-away, Rudolf Nureyev’s island, Tiberius’s villa on Capri and Gore Vidal’s rather less restrained effort at Ravello.

Two days later, and we arrived by sea at an almost empty Positano, pretty beyond belief, where ten-year-old Eve swam from the volcanic beach. It was just a perfect day.

We got two goes at Pompeii. On the one day we all took a special train to Pompeii and then farther down the coast to Herculaneum, the local guide conducting an amiable Tenko-like forced march through the ancient towns in three hours all in.

The next day, familiar now with the train service from Sorrento, we went back alone. This time we could stay, when all the groups had gone, and stroll from the Villa of the Mysteries, with its black and crimson frescoes, past Robert Harris’s water castle, down the Via del Vesuvio, looking at the house of Caecilius, well known to every junior Latin scholar, not least 13-year-old Lily (35 years ago I was chucked out of my first Latin lesson and never allowed back), and — as dusk fell, out through the Marine Gate. It was quite wonderful, and not one complaint from any of my children.

On the last morning Lily and I left the others by the hotel swimming pool and joined a group for a journey up a mountain that I’d never heard of called Monte Faito. If you can imagine it, it’s like the first knuckle of the finger that is the Sorrentine peninsula. A cable car goes to the wooded summit, and there’s a café or two.

From the top you can look out over the bay and Vesuvius one way, along the peninsula and right over to Capri on the other. It is one of those rare things, like the statue of Christ over Rio, a view that is as good as they say it is. Leaving Lily in the sunny garden of the café I went for a solitary walk along the tree-lined ridge, picking up pine cones, and with nothing to worry about, except being back in time for the coach. Which is not much to worry about at all.

Need to know

David Aaronovitch and family travelled with Voyages Jules Verne (0845 1667035, www.vjv.co.uk). Seven nights’ B&B in Sorrento start at £345pp in a three-star hotel and at £495pp in a four-star. Includes return flights and transfers. Excursions are from £20 to £50.

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