Naples travel guide

Top 10 sights in Naples

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Herculaneum

   A smaller and richer town than Pompeii, killed by pyroclastic surges rather than falling ash, which carbonised wood, food and cloth instead of burning them — so upper floors, beams and furniture survive. Around three hundred skeletons were found in the boat sheds in the 1980s, where people had waited for rescue.

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2. 

   2© AlexanderVanLoon · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Cumae

   The first Greek colony on the Italian mainland, founded in the eighth century BC by settlers from Euboea, and the point from which the Greek alphabet passed to the Etruscans and then to Rome. The tunnel identified as the Sibyl's cave is cut a hundred metres into the rock.

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3. 

   3© Mister No · CC BY 3.0

   Naples National Archaeological Museum

   The single most important museum of Roman material anywhere: everything portable from Pompeii and Herculaneum came here, including the Alexander mosaic and the bronzes from the Villa of the Papyri, along with the Farnese marbles. The room of erotic objects was locked from 1849 to 2000.

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4. 

   4© Mentnafunangann · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Museo di Capodimonte

   The Bourbon hunting palace on the hill, hung with what the Farnese inheritance brought to Naples — Titian's Danaë, Parmigianino's Antea, Masaccio, and Caravaggio's Flagellation, painted in this city. The park around it is where Naples walks on Sunday.

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   Castel Nuovo

   The castle Charles of Anjou began in 1279 when he moved his capital here, with a white marble triumphal arch inserted into its front in 1470 for the Aragonese entry. The barons' hall inside has an enormous vault and a bad history.

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   Oplontis

   A vast seaside villa at Torre Annunziata, often attributed to Nero's wife Poppaea, buried in 79 and dug out from the eighteenth century. Its garden paintings — trellises, birds, fountains rendered in perspective — are the best surviving Roman work of that kind.

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7. 

   7© Kleuske · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Baia

   The resort where the Roman rich built their villas, notorious even at the time for what went on in them, and where several emperors died. Bradyseism has sunk half the town, so part of it is a marine protected area seen by glass-bottomed boat or dived.

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8. 

   8© Velvet · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Naples Cathedral

   The cathedral, whose side chapel holds two phials of what is venerated as the blood of San Gennaro. Three times a year the archbishop shows them to the city and the contents usually liquefy; Naples watches closely, because the years when it failed are remembered.

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9. 

   9© Sordelli · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Royal Palace of Naples

   The palace begun in 1600 for the Spanish viceroys and then the Bourbon kings, on the main square. Eight statues of Neapolitan monarchs stand in the facade niches, one per dynasty, and the little court theatre inside survives complete.

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10. 

    10© http://wiki.epicurus.info/User:Erik_Anderson · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Villa of the Papyri

    A villa at Herculaneum whose library is the only one from classical antiquity to survive — about eighteen hundred scrolls, carbonised solid by the eruption. They are now being read without unrolling, by X-ray tomography and machine learning, and new text is coming out of them each year.

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1. 

   1© PaestumPaestum · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Castel dell'Ovo

   A castle on the islet where Greeks from Cumae founded the first settlement here in the seventh century BC. Its name comes from a legend that Virgil hid a magic egg in the foundations, and that if it broke the city would fall — Naples still half enjoys the story.

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2. 

   2© David Sivyer · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Cappella Sansevero

   A small family chapel holding Sanmartino's Veiled Christ of 1753, carved so that the marble reads as damp cloth over a body. Its patron, Raimondo di Sangro, was an alchemist and Freemason, and the two anatomical figures in the crypt — real skeletons with injected vascular systems — are his too.

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3. 

   3© Wolfgang Pehlemann · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

   piazza del Plebiscito

   The main square, named after the plebiscite of 1860 by which Naples voted to join the kingdom of Italy and end the Bourbon state. It was a car park until 1994; it is now paved, empty and used for concerts, which is a considerable improvement.

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4. 

   4© Lalupa · CC BY 3.0

   Castel Sant'Elmo

   A star-shaped fortress on the Vomero, cut into the tuff in the sixteenth century, which has served as barracks, prison and radio station. The rampart walk is the best single viewpoint over Naples, the bay and Vesuvius, and it is usually empty.

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5. 

   5© IlSistemone · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Santa Chiara

   A Franciscan complex of the 1310s that was stripped back to Gothic in the twentieth century after incendiary bombs gutted it in 1943. Its cloister is tiled in majolica of 1742 — columns, benches and all, painted with vines and country scenes — and is the calmest place in the old city.

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   Flavian Amphitheater

   A Roman amphitheatre at Pozzuoli, the third largest in Italy after the Colosseum and the amphitheatre at Capua. It is thought to have been built by the same crews who raised the Colosseum, and its underground works survive almost intact.

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7. 

   7© Lobufalo · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Vesuvius National Park

   The park around Vesuvius, whose 79 eruption killed the towns below and which last erupted in 1944. A path climbs to the crater rim, and the observatory on its flank, founded in 1841, is the oldest volcano observatory in the world.

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   Historic Centre of Naples

   Over a thousand hectares listed as World Heritage in 1995, and the largest historic centre in Europe. The Greek grid of the fourth century BC is still the street plan — Spaccanapoli runs straight down one of the original decumani — and the city is stacked several storeys deep below it.

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9. 

   9© Mentnafunangann · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Palace of Capodimonte

   A large palace in Naples used by the Bourbon kings of the Two Sicilies as a summer residence and hunting lodge. Its main block now holds the Capodimonte national gallery, the principal collection of Neapolitan painting.

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10. 

    10© PaestumPaestum · CC BY 4.0

    San Francesco di Paola

    A church built between 1816 and 1846 as a copy of the Pantheon, closing the west side of the main square with a colonnade sweeping out on both sides. Murat planned the ensemble for Napoleon; the Bourbons finished it and dedicated it to a saint instead.

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