5 Days in Naples

Start in Piazza del Gesù Nuovo, where the church of the same name looks more like a fortress than a church. That's because it was one: the facade of pointed gray stones belonged to a palace built for the Sanseverino princes in 1470, and the Jesuits kept it when they turned the building into a church. Inside, it's the opposite, all colored marble and gold.

Across the square is Santa Chiara, a huge Gothic church built by the Angevin kings, gutted by Allied bombs on 4 August 1943 and rebuilt plain. The reason to go is behind it: the cloister of Santa Chiara, redesigned around 1739-42 by Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, where every pillar and bench is covered in hand-painted majolica tiles of country scenes, masks and vines. It's the calmest place in the center.

From Santa Chiara, walk east on Spaccanapoli, the "Naples splitter". From the hill of San Martino it really does look like someone cut the old city in half with a knife: one straight, narrow street, more than a kilometer long, following the line of the lower Greek decumanus. It changes name several times along the way, and at street level it's a tunnel of tiny shops, shrines, scooters and laundry.

Stop in Piazza San Domenico Maggiore for a coffee at Scaturchio, open since 1905, and try the ministeriale, a chocolate medallion filled with liqueur cream that the shop created in 1919. Look up as you walk: the street is lined with palaces whose courtyards you can often peek into.

A block north of Piazza San Domenico Maggiore is a small private chapel that holds the most famous sculpture in Naples. Giuseppe Sanmartino's Veiled Christ, finished in 1753, shows the dead Christ under a thin shroud, and the marble veil is so fine that for centuries people insisted it must be real cloth turned to stone by alchemy. It isn't. It's carving, and that's more astonishing.

The man behind the chapel, Prince Raimondo di Sangro, was an inventor, freemason and amateur scientist, and Naples has told dark stories about him ever since. Downstairs, two "anatomical machines", real human skeletons with their veins and arteries preserved, keep the legends going.

Via dei Tribunali, the next street north, is pizza street. Gino Sorbillo (closed Sundays) and Di Matteo, open since 1936, sit a few doors apart and both have queues. Put your name down and wait. Pizza here is simple, quick and cheap: a soft, blistered crust baked for about a minute in a wood oven, and a margherita rarely costs more than 6-8 EUR.

At Di Matteo, start with the fried things from the window: a frittatina (a fried disc of pasta, béchamel and peas) and, if you're brave, a pizza fritta, a whole pizza folded and deep-fried. Or eat like a local and get a pizza a portafoglio, a small pizza folded in four and eaten walking.

Naples is built on yellow tuff, a soft volcanic stone, and for 2,500 years people dug it out from under their own houses to build them. The holes became cisterns that fed the city's water until the late 1800s, and in World War II they were turned into air raid shelters. The guided tour of Napoli Sotterranea from Piazza San Gaetano takes you about 40 meters down into them, with a stretch where you squeeze sideways along a candle-lit passage.

Back on the surface, the tour shows you something even stranger: part of the Roman theater where Nero performed, hidden inside the walls of ordinary apartments. Across the square, San Lorenzo Maggiore has a whole Roman market street excavated under its cloister.

The lane running south from Piazza San Gaetano is where Naples makes its presepi, the elaborate nativity scenes families set up at Christmas. The workshops along Via San Gregorio Armeno have been at it for centuries, and they sell everything from tiny terracotta shepherds to whole hand-built villages. The scenes never stopped at Bethlehem, either: next to the Holy Family you'll find pizza makers, fishmongers, footballers and politicians, updated every year.

From November to early January the street is shoulder to shoulder. The rest of the year it's quieter and easier to talk to the artisans.

Walk east to the Duomo, the cathedral of Naples and home of its patron saint, San Gennaro, a bishop beheaded near Pozzuoli around 305. In a chapel on the right side, the Cappella del Tesoro, two glass vials hold what is believed to be his dried blood. Three times a year, on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, on 19 September and on 16 December, the archbishop holds them up, and the city waits to see whether the blood turns liquid. The first record of it is from 1389. The Church calls it a "prodigy" rather than an official miracle, and nobody has ever opened the vials. When it fails, Neapolitans take it as a bad omen. Inside the cathedral, look for the chapel of Santa Restituta and its baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, with mosaics from the late 4th or 5th century, often called the oldest baptistery in the West.

The Museo del Tesoro next door shows the jewels the city gave its saint over the centuries. Then walk two minutes to the Pio Monte della Misericordia, a charity founded in 1602 that still has the painting it commissioned in 1607: Caravaggio's Seven Works of Mercy, hanging over the altar it was painted for.

End the day in Piazza Bellini, at the western edge of the old town, where students from the nearby university and conservatory fill the square most nights. In the middle, behind a railing, you can look down at a stretch of the Greek city walls from the 4th century BC. It's the best place in the center for a first spritz, and the café terraces stay busy until late.

Intra Moenia, a bookshop café on the square since 1989, is a good place to start. Afterwards, Largo San Giovanni Maggiore and the lanes around the university are where the center's cheap bars are.

The National Archaeological Museum is one of the great museums of the ancient world, and it's the other half of Pompeii: almost everything that could be moved from the buried towns, the mosaics, frescoes, statues and even loaves of bread, ended up here. Seeing it before your trip to Pompeii on day four makes the ruins make sense.

Don't miss the Farnese Bull and the Farnese Hercules, two huge marble groups that once stood in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, the mosaic rooms, and the Secret Cabinet, where the Bourbons locked away the erotic art found at Pompeii. The famous Alexander Mosaic, the battle between Alexander the Great and the Persian king Darius, is being restored, and you can watch the restorers at work from two viewing points.

Ten minutes north, down in a valley that was once outside the city walls, is the Rione Sanità. For decades it was a byword for poverty and crime, the neighborhood where the great comic actor Totò was born in 1898 and that most Neapolitans avoided. In the last fifteen years local priests, young guides and a social cooperative called La Paranza reopened its catacombs and churches and turned it into one of the most interesting walks in the city.

Look into the courtyard of Palazzo dello Spagnuolo, with its double "hawk's wing" staircase from the 1730s, then have lunch at Concettina ai Tre Santi, the neighborhood pizzeria that the Oliva family has turned into one of the best-known in the city. Finish at Pasticceria Poppella with a fiocco di neve, a "snowflake" brioche filled with cold, sweet cream, which people queue for.

At the far end of the Sanità, an old tuff quarry holds the bones of thousands of people, most of them victims of the plague of 1656 and the cholera of 1836. In the 19th century the women of the neighborhood began to "adopt" skulls, the anime pezzentelle or poor abandoned souls, cleaning them, building them little houses and praying to them for favors, until the Church banned the cult in 1969.

It's an eerie, moving place, and it says a lot about how close Naples keeps the living and the dead. After years of being closed or only half-open, the cemetery reopened on 18 April 2026, now with proper visits.

Walk up Via Capodimonte (or take a short bus ride) to the entrance of the Catacombs of San Gennaro, the largest early Christian burial site in southern Italy. Unlike the narrow catacombs of Rome, these are wide, two-story halls dug into the tuff, with frescoes from the 2nd to the 10th century, including what is thought to be the oldest image of San Gennaro.

The tours are run by La Paranza, the same Sanità cooperative that reopened the Fontanelle, and the money pays for jobs and projects in the neighborhood. Your guide will likely be a young local, which makes it a better tour than most.

At the top of the hill is the Bourbon royal palace of Capodimonte, built from 1738 to show off the Farnese art collection that Charles of Bourbon had inherited from his mother. It's now one of the best painting museums in Italy and one of the least crowded: Titian, Raphael, Bruegel, Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio's Flagellation, painted in Naples in 1607, along with rooms of the porcelain the Bourbons made in their own factory here.

Save some time for the park around it, the Real Bosco, which looks out over the whole city and the bay. Locals come up here on weekends to walk and run.

Back in the center, have dinner the way Neapolitans eat on Sundays. Ragù napoletano is nothing like a bolognese: whole pieces of beef and pork simmered for six hours or more in tomato until the sauce turns dark and sweet, then served on pasta first and the meat second. The playwright Eduardo De Filippo wrote a poem about it, and every family thinks theirs is the only real one. Its rival is the genovese, which despite the name has nothing to do with Genoa: beef cooked down with a mountain of onions until they melt into a sauce.

Tandem, a small place in the center that opened in 2013 to cook almost nothing but ragù, is the easy way to try it. It takes no bookings, so come early.

Gran Caffè Gambrinus has been the city's grand café since 1860, all mirrors, stucco and waiters in jackets. Order at the counter, standing, like everyone else: an espresso here is strong, short and served with a glass of water. Gambrinus also keeps alive the custom of the caffè sospeso, the "suspended coffee": you pay for two and drink one, and the second goes to someone who can't afford it.

Have it with a sfogliatella, the shell-shaped pastry of a hundred crisp layers filled with ricotta and candied orange. For the most famous one, walk five minutes up Via Toledo to Pintauro, the shop that made it a Naples classic in the 1800s. It closed for years and reopened under new owners in March 2026.

Next door is Piazza del Plebiscito, the city's biggest square, with the colonnade and dome of San Francesco di Paola, a copy of Rome's Pantheon, on one side and the long red facade of the Palazzo Reale on the other. The palace was built for the Spanish viceroys in the early 1600s and became the home of the Bourbon kings, who ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from here until Garibaldi arrived in 1860. The niches on its facade hold eight kings of Naples, from the Norman Roger to Victor Emmanuel II.

Inside are the royal apartments, a court theater and a grand double staircase, and the view from the hanging garden over the port and Vesuvius. Under the hill behind the palace runs the Galleria Borbonica, a tunnel dug for a Bourbon king in the 1850s and later used as an air raid shelter, with wrecked cars and scooters still lying in it. It's visited on guided tours, mostly from Friday to Sunday.

Built onto the side of the palace is the Teatro di San Carlo, which opened on 4 November 1737, decades before La Scala, and is the oldest opera house in the world still in use. The guided tours take you into the red and gold auditorium and the royal box. Better still, see a performance: the season runs roughly from late autumn to early summer.

Across the street is the Galleria Umberto I, a shopping arcade built in 1887-90 under a glass and iron dome, part of the rebuilding of Naples after a terrible cholera epidemic in 1884. Look down at the floor under the dome for the mosaic of the zodiac.

Walk up Via Toledo, the main shopping street, laid out by the Spanish viceroy Pedro de Toledo in 1536 and full of people from morning to midnight. Halfway up, go down into Toledo station on metro line 1. Spanish architect Óscar Tusquets designed it, it opened in 2012, and it's regularly called the most beautiful metro station in Europe: you descend through layers of color into a deep blue cone of mosaics that feels like going under the sea.

Before you go down, look into the Gallerie d'Italia at Via Toledo 177, a bank's art museum that holds Caravaggio's last painting, the Martyrdom of St Ursula, finished in Naples in 1610 weeks before he died.

You'll need a ticket to get past the gates. It's one of several "art stations" on line 1, and Università, Dante and Garibaldi are worth a look too if you're riding the line.

West of Via Toledo, a grid of steep, narrow streets climbs the hill. These are the Quartieri Spagnoli, built in the 1500s to house Spanish soldiers, and still one of the most densely packed neighborhoods in Europe. Life happens on the street here, in the bassi, ground-floor homes whose doors open straight onto the lane.

In a small square, Largo Maradona, a giant mural of Diego Maradona looks down from a wall. He played for Napoli from 1984 to 1991 and won the club its first two league titles, in 1987 and 1990, and to the city he's somewhere between a saint and a family member. The square is now a shrine, with candles, scarves and a crowd of visitors. Napoli has since won the league again, in 2023 and 2025.

For lunch, walk to Piazza Carità, where Trattoria Nennella, a Quartieri institution, moved in 2023: cheap home cooking, waiters who shout and sing, and no reservations. Or get a cuoppo, a paper cone of fried seafood or vegetables, from a friggitoria in the Pignasecca market nearby.

Take the Centrale funicular from Via Toledo (near the Augusteo stop) up to Vomero, the leafy hill above the center, and walk to Castel Sant'Elmo, a star-shaped Spanish fortress from the 1500s. From its walls you get the view of Naples: the whole city spread below you, Spaccanapoli cutting through it, the port, the bay, and Vesuvius behind.

Just below it is the Certosa di San Martino, a Carthusian monastery so lavishly decorated that it's basically a museum of Neapolitan baroque, with a huge collection of nativity scenes and terraces over the bay. Stay up here until sunset.

Ride the Chiaia funicular back down and you're in Chiaia, the elegant neighborhood between Via Toledo and the sea, with boutiques, galleries and the city's smartest bars. Evenings, especially Thursday to Saturday, young Naples gathers in the lanes around Via Bisignano and Vico Belledonne, known as the baretti, the "little bars". People drink standing in the street with a spritz or a beer, and the crowd spills from one bar into the next.

It's a different city from the one you saw this morning: well dressed, relaxed and in no hurry to go home.

On 24 August AD 79, or perhaps a couple of months later (scholars now argue for October), Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii under several meters of ash and pumice. The town was rediscovered in 1748 and has been dug up ever since, and about two-thirds of it is now excavated. What makes it extraordinary is that it's a whole town, not just monuments: streets with ruts worn by carts, stepping stones for crossing them, shops, bars, bakeries, graffiti and election posters on the walls.

Start at the Forum, with Vesuvius rising behind the temple of Jupiter, then walk down Via dell'Abbondanza, the main street, past the Stabian Baths and the bars with their counters of clay jars. Walk all the way to the amphitheater at the far end, the oldest surviving Roman one, built around 70 BC.

The best of Pompeii is inside the houses. Look for the House of the Faun, the biggest in town (its Alexander Mosaic is the one in the Naples museum), the House of the Vettii, two rich freedmen whose frescoes have been restored to their original color, and the Lupanar, the town brothel, with its stone beds and erotic paintings over the doors.

Then walk out to the Villa of the Mysteries, just outside the walls, whose dining room is painted with a life-size, blood-red fresco of an initiation ritual that nobody has fully explained. The plaster casts of the victims, made by pouring plaster into the hollows their bodies left in the ash, are shown in several places around the site. They're the part of Pompeii you don't forget.

Leave Pompeii by about 12:30, grab a sandwich and take the bus from outside the station: the ride up takes 40-50 minutes. Buses run from Pompei and Ercolano to the car park at about 1,000 meters, and from there a gravel path, Trail 5, the Gran Cono, climbs to the rim of the crater. It's about 4 km there and back on a steep, dusty path, so allow 1.5-2 hours on foot. At the top you look down into a crater about 300 meters deep, with steam still seeping from its walls, and out over the whole Bay of Naples.

Vesuvius last erupted in 1944, during the Allied occupation, and it's considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because some 700,000 people live in its red zone. It's monitored constantly, and the trail closes in strong wind.

The volcano that destroyed Pompeii also makes the land around it some of the most fertile in Italy, and wine has been made on its slopes since Roman times. The local wine is Lacryma Christi, "Christ's tears", part of the Vesuvio wine area: whites from the Coda di Volpe grape, reds from Piedirosso. The story goes that when Lucifer fell from heaven he took a piece of paradise with him, and Christ wept over the Bay of Naples where it landed.

Several wineries on the slopes offer tastings with local cured meats, cheese and the small, sweet piennolo tomatoes that grow in the volcanic soil. On this day there isn't time for a long winery lunch, so book a late-afternoon tasting on the way down from the crater, or have a glass with dinner. Most wineries need a reservation and some can arrange transport.

The Circumvesuviana brings you back to Garibaldi station, ten minutes' walk from the Antica Pizzeria da Michele in Forcella, open since 1870 and on this street since 1930. It became world-famous after Julia Roberts ate here in Eat Pray Love, and it's built its fame on a tiny menu centered on the margherita and the marinara. Some locals say the pizza is now average for the queue. Go anyway once, for the marble tables and the history, and decide for yourself.

This is also the place to settle the story you'll hear all week: that the margherita was invented in June 1889 for Queen Margherita, in the colors of the Italian flag. The pizzeria where it supposedly happened, Brandi, still has the royal "thank-you letter" on its wall, but historians have shown that pizza with tomato, mozzarella and basil existed decades earlier and the letter is doubtful. A legend with a date, then.

The big castle next to the ferry port is Castel Nuovo, the "new castle", built by the French Angevin king Charles I in the 1280s and rebuilt by the Aragonese in the 1400s, which is why Neapolitans also call it the Maschio Angioino, the Angevin keep. Between two of its round towers, Alfonso of Aragon squeezed in a white marble triumphal arch celebrating his entry into the city in 1443, one of the first great works of the Renaissance in southern Italy.

Inside are the civic museum, a chapel and the Hall of the Barons, where King Ferrante had a group of rebellious nobles arrested at a wedding feast in 1486.

Walk south past the Palazzo Reale and down to the sea at Santa Lucia, where the lungomare, the seafront promenade, begins. Via Partenope and Via Caracciolo have been closed to traffic since 2012, and they're where the whole city walks on a Sunday. In front of you is Castel dell'Ovo, the "egg castle", on the islet where the Greeks first settled. The legend says the poet Virgil hid a magic egg in its foundations, and if it ever breaks, the castle and the city will fall.

The castle has been closed for long stretches for restoration since 2023. When it's open, entry is free and the terraces have one of the best views of the bay, so check before you go. Either way, you can walk over the causeway to the little harbor at its foot, Borgo Marinari, and along its outer walls.

The old fishing village under the castle is now a row of restaurants on the water, and it's the classic place for a long seafood lunch with Vesuvius across the bay. La Bersagliera, open since 1919, is the old-school choice, with waiters in white jackets. It's closed on Tuesdays.

Order spaghetti alle vongole, spaghetti with clams, olive oil, garlic and parsley, the dish Neapolitans eat by the sea, then grilled or fried fish, and finish with a babà, the rum-soaked yeast cake. You're paying for the view here, and locals rarely eat in the borgo, but it's worth it once. On a Tuesday, when La Bersagliera is closed, the neighboring restaurants work just as well.

Take a taxi or bus up to Posillipo, the long ridge west of the city where rich Romans built their villas, and Neapolitans still dream of living. At its tip, an underwater nature park protects the sea around the Gaiola, two tiny islets joined by a stone bridge, with a crumbling villa that locals say is cursed, since several of its owners died young or lost their fortunes. The water is the clearest in Naples.

Above the park, the ruins of the Roman villa of Pausilypon and the long Roman tunnel of the Grotta di Seiano can be visited on guided tours. Swimming from the small beach is possible in summer.

Just around the headland is Marechiaro, a tiny fishing hamlet made famous by one of the best-known Neapolitan songs, written in 1886, which sings of a window above the sea. Look for the little window with a carnation on it in the wall above the harbor.

For the last sunset of the trip, walk up to the Parco Virgiliano, a park at the top of Posillipo with terraces looking out over the islands of Nisida, Procida and Ischia on one side and the whole bay to Capri on the other.

End where you'd end any evening in Naples: with pizza. Come down to Mergellina, the little harbor at the foot of Posillipo, for 50 Kalò on Piazza Sannazaro, where pizzaiolo Ciro Salvo makes some of the most celebrated pizza in Italy, regularly near the top of the national rankings. The crust is lighter and puffier than in the old center, and the toppings change with the season.

Just behind the station of Mergellina, a small park holds what tradition calls the Tomb of Virgil, the poet who, in the legend, hid the egg under Castel dell'Ovo. Afterwards, walk along the harbor, where the hydrofoils leave for the islands, and get a limonata a cosce aperte, lemon juice and soda with a pinch of bicarbonate that foams up when it's served, from one of the kiosks on the seafront.