Southern Italy: Naples to Lecce
When to go
April to June and September to mid-October. In July and August the Amalfi coast road is jammed from morning to night, the parking in Positano costs as much as a meal, and Puglia passes thirty-five degrees. In winter the coast is half closed — many hotels and the ferries stop — but Matera and Lecce are at their quietest and loveliest.
The stops
Interactive map of the route on our site ›
- Naples2 nights
The city of Neapolitan pizza, whose art of the pizzaiuolo was inscribed by UNESCO in 2017 as intangible heritage. Under the old centre lies a second city of Greek and Roman tunnels and cisterns, used as air-raid shelters in the Second World War.
- Pompeiistop on the way
The Roman town buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year seventy-nine. The hollows the bodies left in the ash were filled with plaster in the nineteenth century, and the casts still lie where people fell. Come at opening time; it is a day of walking with little shade.
- Sorrento3 nights
A town on a cliff above the bay, the birthplace in 1544 of the poet Torquato Tasso, and the best base for the coast: from its port, boats run to Capri, so the car can stay parked for a day.
- Capristop on the way
A day by boat from Sorrento — about half an hour to Marina Grande; the car stays behind. The emperor Tiberius ruled the Roman Empire from his villa on the island for the last ten years of his life. Boats go into the Blue Grotto only in calm sea, lying flat in a rowing boat under the low entrance.
- Positanostop on the way
A village of pastel houses stacked down a ravine to a beach. A fishing village until the mid-twentieth century, it was made famous by a 1953 essay of John Steinbeck, who wrote that it bites deep.
- Amalfistop on the way
In the Middle Ages Amalfi was a maritime republic trading with Constantinople and the Levant, and its sea code, the Tavole Amalfitane, was followed across the Mediterranean for centuries. The cathedral, up a long stair, holds relics of the apostle Andrew.
- Salernostop on the way
In the Middle Ages Salerno had the Schola Medica Salernitana, the first medical school in Europe, where women studied and taught as well as men. The cathedral holds the relics of the apostle Matthew, and in September 1943 the Allies landed on the beaches south of the city. Here the coast road down from Amalfi ends.
- Paestumone night
Three Greek temples of the sixth and fifth centuries before the common era, among the best preserved anywhere, standing in a field. The museum holds the Tomb of the Diver, the only Greek painting of its time to survive with figures, a young man diving into the sea.
- Pertosa Cavesstop on the way
Limestone caves under the Alburni mountains, the only caves in Italy where you start the visit by boat, on the underground river that carved them. Inside, archaeologists found the remains of a Bronze Age village built on wooden piles over the water.
- Castelmezzanoone night
A stone village wedged among the sandstone spires of the Lucanian Dolomites, facing its twin, Pietrapertosa, across the valley. A steel cable is strung between the two villages, and on the Flight of the Angel visitors cross it harnessed face-down at more than a hundred kilometres an hour.
- Matera2 nights
The Sassi, houses and churches cut into a ravine, were lived in until the 1950s, families and animals together in caves without water; a law of 1952 moved the people out, and the city was called the shame of Italy. It is now a World Heritage site, and was European Capital of Culture in 2019. North of here, at Venosa, are Jewish catacombs of late antiquity with inscriptions in Hebrew, Greek and Latin.
- Altamurastop on the way
In 1993 cavers found in the Lamalunga cave near here the skeleton of a Neanderthal man, wrapped in calcite and so fused to the rock that it has been left where it lies. The town’s bread, baked from durum wheat, was the first bread in Europe to receive a protected designation of origin.
- Castel del Montestop on the way
An octagonal castle with eight octagonal towers, built alone on a hilltop in the 1240s by the emperor Frederick II, whose purpose is still argued over: it has no moat and no kitchen. It is printed on the Italian one-cent euro coin.
- Tranione night
A white port town with a Romanesque cathedral on the sea, and one of the oldest synagogues in Europe, the Scolanova, built in the thirteenth century. It was turned into a church after the Jews were forced to convert, and was returned to the Jewish community and reconsecrated in 2006.
- Bari2 nights
The capital of Puglia, and its old town, Bari Vecchia, is a knot of white alleys on a peninsula. In the Basilica of San Nicola lie the bones of Saint Nicholas, which sailors from Bari carried off from Myra in 1087; in the lanes around it, women still roll orecchiette by hand at their doorsteps.
- Polignano a Marestop on the way
A white town on limestone cliffs over the Adriatic, with a tiny beach, Lama Monachile, at the bottom of a ravine under a road bridge. Domenico Modugno, who wrote and sang Volare, was born here, and his bronze statue stands on the seafront with arms flung open.
- Alberobelloone night
A town of trulli, round stone houses with conical roofs built without mortar, about fifteen hundred of them, a World Heritage site since 1996. One story says they were built dry so they could be pulled down quickly when the king’s tax inspectors came.
- Cisterninostop on the way
A white hill town of the Itria valley, known for its fornelli: butcher shops where you choose your meat at the counter and it is grilled for you on the spot and served at tables in the lane.
- Ostunistop on the way
The white city, its old town on a hill whitewashed with lime — a habit usually explained by the old belief that lime kept the plague away. From the top, olive groves run down to the Adriatic, some of the trees many centuries old.
- Lecce2 nights
The Florence of the south, built in the soft local limestone that is carved like wood into baroque façades. Under Palazzo Taurino a Jewish museum shows the medieval Jewish quarter. Half an hour away, at Santa Maria al Bagno, a museum keeps the murals painted by Holocaust survivors who waited here between 1943 and 1947 to sail to the Land of Israel.
What it costs
Eighty dollars a night is the room. The car, the fuel and the tolls are yours: the motorway out of Naples toward Salerno is tolled, the A2 south of Salerno is free, and the A14 in Puglia is tolled again. Fuel in Italy is among the dearest in Europe. The expense nobody budgets is parking: in Naples, on the Amalfi coast and in the old towns, a guarded garage or a paid lot is the only option, often thirty euros a day and more.
What to know
Three things. One: the ZTL. Almost every historic centre in Italy — Naples, Sorrento, Matera, Lecce, Ostuni — is a limited traffic zone watched by cameras, and driving past the sign, even by mistake to reach a hotel, brings a fine by post months later, through the rental company with a fee on top. Ask the hotel to register your plate, or park outside. Two: the Amalfi coast road. It is narrow, cut into the cliff, shared with buses that take both lanes on the bends; in recent summers an odd-and-even plate rule has been applied to it on busy days, so check before you drive, and consider leaving the car in Sorrento and taking the boat. Three: drive with dipped headlights outside towns, carry an international driving permit with your licence, and do not leave anything visible in a parked car in Naples.
Roads, tolls and rules
Italy drives on the right. The motorways are fast and well kept, with Tutor cameras that measure the average speed between two points over long stretches. The coast roads and the roads of the Murge in Puglia are narrow and slow; plan by the hour, not the kilometre. This track is paced for that: no day is longer than about a hundred and fifty kilometres, with a night among the temples of Paestum and one in the mountain village of Castelmezzano on the way across to Matera, and two nights each in Matera and Bari. Rental cars are mostly small and manual — and small is what you want in these towns; automatics must be booked well ahead.
Travel Southern Italy: Naples to Lecce
The route on our site, with a room up to $80 every night.