Naples: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Naples is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe, founded by Greeks around 600 BC and called Neapolis, the new city. They laid out three long straight streets running east to west and crossed them with a ladder of narrow lanes — and that grid is still the street plan you walk on today, two and a half thousand years later. Everything since has been built on top of it, forty metres deep in places. Two hours, flat, and very loud.
A short history of Naples
Greeks from Cumae founded Neapolis, the "new city", here more than 2,500 years ago. In AD 79 Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1224 the emperor Frederick II founded one of the first public universities in Europe here. For centuries Naples was the capital of a kingdom, and in the 17th century it was one of the largest cities on the continent, until the plague of 1656 killed about half of its inhabitants. In 1861 it joined unified Italy. In 1995 its historic centre was declared a World Heritage Site.
The ten best sights in Naples
1Museo Archeologico€22, and everything found at Pompeii is here, not there
2Cappella Sansevero€10, booked online, and the veiled Christ is carved from one block
3Duomo di NapoliFree, and the blood of San Gennaro liquefies here three times a year
4Santa Chiara€6 for the majolica cloister, and it is the quietest place in the centre
5San Lorenzo Maggiore€9, and a Roman market street runs under the floor
6Pio Monte della Misericordia€8, and Caravaggio’s altarpiece is in the room he painted it for
7Museo di Capodimonte€15, a royal hunting palace, and a park around it
8Certosa di San Martino€6, the best view of the bay, and a nativity collection in it
9Napoli Sotterranea€12, forty metres down, Greek quarries and wartime shelters
10Catacombe di San Gennaro€10, run by local young people, and the ticket pays their wages
Scan with your phone camera to open the map there
What is an audio walk?
Tours in Naples →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Naples:
Free walking tours in Naples
A Greek grid under a Roman city
Naples is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe, founded by Greeks around 600 BC and called Neapolis, the new city. They laid out three long straight streets running east to west and crossed them with a ladder of narrow lanes — and that grid is still the street plan you walk on today, two and a half thousand years later. Everything since has been built on top of it, forty metres deep in places. Two hours, flat, and very loud.
- Spaccanapoli · The name means "Naples splitter", and from the hill above you can see it as a dead-straight dark line cutting the old city in half. It is one of the three Greek decumani, and it has not moved by a metre in twenty-five centuries.
- Santa Chiara · An Allied bomb burned the church out completely in 1943 and the Baroque inside was lost; it was rebuilt to its original fourteenth-century plan instead, which turned out to be a better building. The cloister behind is tiled in majolica from 1742 and is the one silent place in the quarter.
- Cappella Sansevero · The Veiled Christ was carved in 1753 by a twenty-six-year-old from a single block of marble — the shroud and the body are the same stone. The prince who commissioned it was an alchemist and a Freemason, and the rumour that he had the veil made chemically has been tested and disproved twice.
- San Lorenzo Maggiore · Under the cloister floor is a complete Roman market street with shops, a bakery and a laundry still standing to shoulder height, ten metres down. Boccaccio saw a woman in this church in 1334 and spent the rest of his life writing about her.
- Via San Gregorio Armeno · A lane of workshops that make nativity figures all year round, and the tradition is to add the year’s public figures to the scene — footballers, politicians, whoever disgraced themselves. The street sits on a Greek road to a temple of Ceres, and the figure-making is thought to be continuous from it.
- Duomo di Napoli · A sealed phial here is said to hold the dried blood of San Gennaro, and three times a year it is brought out and, almost always, turns liquid. When it failed in 1944 Vesuvius erupted; when it failed in 1980 an earthquake killed three thousand. The city takes this seriously.
The mountain that kept it
On the 24th of August 79 AD Vesuvius buried two towns in a single day — Pompeii under four metres of pumice, Herculaneum under twenty metres of superheated mud that carbonised the wood instead of burning it. The result is the only place on earth where an ordinary Roman street survives: shops, bars, graffiti, bread still in the oven. Three million people now live in the danger zone. This is a full day, and it starts underground in the city itself.
- Napoli Sotterranea · The Greeks quarried the soft yellow tuff from under their own city to build it, leaving a honeycomb of cisterns forty metres down. The Romans made it an aqueduct, the Bourbons sealed it, and in 1943 forty thousand people lived in it for months during the bombing. Some of their toys are still there.
- Museo Archeologico · Everything portable found at Pompeii and Herculaneum was brought here, which is why the sites themselves can feel bare. The Secret Cabinet holds the erotic material, which the Bourbons bricked up in 1819 and which was only opened to the public without special permission in 2000.
- Herculaneum · Smaller and far better preserved than Pompeii, because the mud sealed it rather than crushed it — wooden doors, beds, rope and a carbonised library of eighteen hundred scrolls survived. The scrolls are being read now by X-ray without unrolling them, and new text is coming out every year.
- Pompeii · Sixty-six hectares, of which a third has never been dug. The plaster casts of the dead were made by an excavator in 1863 who realised the voids in the ash were body-shaped and poured plaster into them — an invention of method, not a discovery.
- Mount Vesuvius · The only active volcano on the European mainland, last erupted in 1944, and the most closely watched on earth — there are seismometers on it going back to 1841, the first volcano observatory ever built. The walk from the car park to the rim takes about half an hour.
- Lungomare · Three kilometres of seafront closed to cars since 2012, after a referendum the city council had resisted for twenty years. Vesuvius is directly opposite across the bay, which is the whole point — you walk towards the thing that destroyed the coast you are standing on.
The quarter they told you to avoid
For decades the guidebooks drew a line around the Sanità and the Spanish Quarters and said do not go. Both are now the most interesting walk in Naples, and the change came from inside: a priest in the Sanità put local teenagers through training as guides and gave them the catacombs to run, and the enterprise now employs more than forty people and pays for the quarter. This walk is that, and it is uphill and down. Two and a half hours.
- Quartieri Spagnoli · Built in the 1530s as barracks for Spanish garrison troops, in a grid of lanes so narrow the sun reaches the ground for about an hour a day. The Maradona mural on a wall here has become a shrine; he played for Napoli from 1984 to 1991 and won the city its only two league titles.
- Toledo metro · Naples spent thirty years building a metro and commissioned artists instead of engineers to finish the stations. Toledo is a shaft of blue mosaic lit from above to look like you are standing under water, which is roughly where you are — the station is below sea level.
- Rione Sanità · The quarter was cut off from the city in 1809 when a bridge was built over the top of it so the king would not have to drive through, and it stayed cut off for two centuries. Totò, the greatest Italian comic actor, was born here, and the Palazzo dello Spagnolo has a double staircase that is the best thing in Naples nobody photographs.
- Catacombe di San Gennaro · Second-century Christian burial galleries on two levels, with the oldest Christian frescoes in southern Italy. They are run entirely by a cooperative of young people from the Sanità, set up in 2006, and the money from the tickets stays in the quarter.
- Cimitero delle Fontanelle · A tuff quarry holding the bones of about forty thousand people, mostly plague and cholera dead with no names. Neapolitans used to adopt a skull, clean it, pray for it and ask it for favours — a cult the archbishop banned in 1969 and which never entirely stopped.
- Certosa di San Martino · A Carthusian monastery on the hill, and the terrace gives the view the whole city is built for. Inside is the Cuciniello crib, a nativity scene the size of a room with eight hundred figures, which is less about religion than about what a Neapolitan street looked like in 1790.
Getting to Naples and getting around
- Capodichino Airport · Seven kilometres out, and the Alibus to the centre is €5
- Napoli Centrale · Rome in 70 minutes, and the Circumvesuviana to Pompeii leaves below
- Toledo metro · Called the most beautiful metro station in Europe, and it is free to walk down
- Molo Beverello · Ferries to Capri, Ischia and Procida all leave from here
- Funicolare Centrale · Four funiculars climb to Vomero. A city ticket covers them
Cheap eats in Naples
Eight counters where Naples eats standing. Pizza was invented here as food for the poor, sold folded in four from a stall, and the price has stayed honest: a margherita in a real pizzeria is five euros. The other thing to know is the coffee — a Neapolitan espresso is short, strong and already sweet, and costs about a euro at the bar.
- Da Michele · €5 a pizza, cash, and the wait can be an hour
- Sorbillo · From €5, and put your name down and go for a walk
- Di Matteo · €3 for the fried one, standing at the door
- Pignasecca · The oldest street market, and the fried-food stalls in it
- Friggitoria Vomero · A paper cone of fried things for €3, since 1938
- Scaturchio · The sfogliatella, hot, and the queue at eight in the morning
- Caffè Mexico · €1 at the bar, already sweet, and say so if you want it plain
- Porta Nolana · The fish market from six, and nobody there is a tourist
Museums in Naples
- Museo Archeologico · €22, closed Tuesdays, and the mosaics are the first floor
- Cappella Sansevero · €10, booked online, and thirty minutes is the whole visit
- Museo di Capodimonte · €15, and the park is free and open from dawn
- Certosa di San Martino · €6, the best view in Naples, and the crib collection
- Pio Monte della Misericordia · €8, one room, and it is worth the detour
- Napoli Sotterranea · €12, forty metres down, and one passage is very narrow
- Galleria Borbonica · €12, a king’s escape tunnel full of abandoned 1950s cars
- Teatro di San Carlo · €9 to tour, 1737, and it is older than La Scala by 41 years
Nature and day trips near Naples
- Mount Vesuvius · €10 plus the bus, and the last 30 minutes are on foot
- Capri · 50 minutes by fast ferry, €23, and take the first one
- Procida · 40 minutes out, four square kilometres, and almost no tourists
- Parco Virgiliano · Free, on the Posillipo headland, and the whole bay from it
- Bosco di Capodimonte · Free, 134 hectares, and the city runs in it
- Solfatara · Closed to visitors since 2017 — seen from outside
- Orto Botanico · Free, founded by Napoleon’s brother-in-law in 1807
- Villa Comunale · Free, a seafront park, and an 1874 aquarium in it
Things to do in Naples with kids
- Castel dell’Ovo · Free, and the ramparts are open to walk on
- Pompeii · Free for under 18s, and the amphitheatre is the best bit
- Via San Gregorio Armeno · Workshops making tiny figures, and free to watch
- Funicolare · Four funiculars up the hill, €1.30, and a city ticket covers it
- Villa Comunale · An aquarium from 1874 and space to run by the sea
- Castel Sant’Elmo · €5, a star-shaped fort, and the roof walk goes all the way round
Live music in Naples
- Teatro di San Carlo · From €30, and the tour is €9 if you cannot get a ticket
- Piazza Bellini · Greek walls in the middle, music in the bars round them
- Stadio Maradona · Tickets from €25, and the atmosphere is the point
- Galleria Umberto I · Street musicians under the glass dome most evenings
- Gambrinus · Since 1860, and Oscar Wilde and Mussolini both sat in it
- Via dei Tribunali · The street fills after ten and the music is live
Nightlife in Naples
- Piazza Bellini · The student square, €3 a glass, and it never empties
- Chiaia · The smart quarter, and the bars spill into the lanes
- Piazza Dante · A Vanvitelli square from 1757, and cafés around all of it
- Mergellina · The harbour end of the seafront, and it stays open late
- Via Toledo · A kilometre of people walking, and that is the evening
- Vomero · Up the funicular, cooler air, and the locals’ bars
Frequently asked questions about Naples
What is there to see in Naples?
The top sights in Naples are Museo Archeologico, Cappella Sansevero and Duomo di Napoli. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Naples?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Naples without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Naples?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Naples, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: A Greek grid under a Roman city.
How do you get to Naples and get around?
The main ways are Capodichino Airport, Napoli Centrale and Toledo metro. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Naples, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Naples that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Naples for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.