Four days in Naples: Pompeii is the day trip, not the reason

Three nights in the old city, one full day at Pompeii, and the museum that holds everything the excavations took away. Everything else within a funicular ride.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Naples
Places
10 across 4 days
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Most people come to Naples for Pompeii and treat the city as the place the hotel is. It is a strange decision, because Naples is far older than the ruins, has been continuously inhabited since the Greeks founded it, and everything portable that was dug out of Pompeii is sitting in a museum here.

It is also the city visitors are most often warned about and most often surprised by. Yes, it is loud, the traffic is a negotiation rather than a system, and the old centre is a canyon of six-storey tenements with washing strung across it. It is also the least sanitised big city in western Europe, and the one where a hundred euros still buys a serious day out.

Four days is the right length: two of them in the city, one at Pompeii, and one that ends on a hill above the bay watching a live volcano do nothing in particular.

Highlights

  • A marble Christ under a marble sheet, carved so thin people still argue about how it was done
  • Pompeii's forum with Vesuvius standing over it, which is the whole story in one view
  • The Alexander Mosaic and the Farnese marbles, indoors, ten minutes from the station
  • Greek quarries and wartime shelters forty metres under the shopping streets

Where to stay

Naples, three nights

Founded by Greeks who called it the new city, a name it has kept for two and a half thousand years without ever being new again. It was the capital of its own kingdom for more than five hundred years and one of the largest cities in Europe, and it has the layered, self-contained feel that goes with that: its own dialect, its own patron saint, its own opinion of the rest of Italy.

The centre is built on the Greek grid and has never been widened. Underneath it is a second city of quarries and cisterns, because the soft yellow stone the buildings are made of was dug out from directly below them.

Day by day

Day 1 in Naples

The old streets, and the Veiled Christ

The old centre is three parallel streets laid out by Greek surveyors and never rebuilt, and the first afternoon is best spent walking them without much of a plan beyond two doors. The scale takes adjusting to: tenements six floors high on streets four metres wide, shrines set into the walls, and a volume of scooter traffic that seems physically impossible.

The one thing worth a booked slot is a private chapel a prince spent his fortune on in the 1750s. He was a Freemason, an inventor and an amateur chemist with a reputation the church never quite forgave, and what he commissioned is unlike anything else in Italy.

Eat pizza in the evening, in the quarter where it was invented, and expect to queue.

  1. 15:30

    Santa Chiara

    Religious

    A vast Gothic church rebuilt from the ground up after it burned in a 1943 air raid, with a cloister behind it tiled in the 1740s in yellow and blue majolica: octagonal pillars, painted benches, lemon trees. The quietest place in the old city.

  2. 17:30

    Cappella Sansevero

    Religious

    The Veiled Christ, carved in 1753 from a single block, with a marble sheet lying over the body so thinly you can read the wounds through it. In the crypt below are two anatomical models of the circulatory system that nobody has fully explained. Timed entry, booked ahead.

  3. 20:00

    Pizza, standing in a queue

    Eat

    The famous places take no bookings, give you a number and put you on the pavement with everybody else. It is worth the forty minutes once. Fried pizza from a hatch is the same dough and no wait at all.

With more time: San Gregorio Armeno, a street off the same route, sells nativity figures all year round: shepherds, kings, and small clay footballers and politicians. Either the warmest or the most surreal thing in Naples, depending on the day you have had.

Day 2 in Naples

Pompeii, a whole day

Take an early Circumvesuviana and give the site the whole day. Pompeii covers more than sixty hectares, about two thirds of it excavated, and it is a town rather than a monument: you walk down streets with kerbs, stepping stones and wheel ruts, past bars with the counters still in place.

The three below are the spine of a visit, but the pleasure is in the ordinary things between them. Look for the water towers on the corners, the election slogans painted on house fronts, and the deep grooves the carts wore into the paving.

Vesuvius is in the frame from most of the site, which is the detail that makes it land. In 79 the town had no idea it was a volcano at all: nobody living had seen it erupt, and the slopes were planted with vines.

  1. 09:15

    Forum

    Historic

    The public square of a working Roman town, with the temples and the law courts around it and Vesuvius closing the view at the north end. Start here, because it is where the plan of the town makes sense.

  2. 11:15

    House of the Faun

    Historic

    The largest private house in Pompeii, named for the bronze dancing figure in its courtyard. The Alexander Mosaic covered its floor: what is here now is a copy, and the original is in the museum you see tomorrow.

  3. 12:30

    Lunch, brought with you

    Eat

    The food inside the site is a cafeteria and the restaurants outside the gates are aimed at coaches. Buy something in Naples before you get on the train and eat it in the shade of the Great Palaestra.

  4. 14:00

    Villa dei Misteri

    Other

    A villa outside the walls, ten minutes past the far gate and skipped by most of the crowd, holding a room of near life-size figures on a deep red ground: an initiation into some Dionysiac rite that nobody has convincingly decoded.

With more time: Herculaneum is the alternative if a whole day of ruins sounds like too much. It is a quarter of the size, twenty minutes from Naples rather than forty, and better preserved, because it was buried by hot mud rather than falling stone: upper floors, wooden doors, roof beams and carbonised furniture all survive there and do not at Pompeii.

Day 3 in Naples

The museum, the city underneath, and the hill above

Everything worth carrying away from Pompeii was carried here in the eighteenth century, when the Bourbon kings dug the buried towns as a private treasure hunt. Seeing the site first and the contents second is the right order, and it turns a room of mosaics into something you recognise.

In the afternoon go underneath. Forty metres down there are Greek quarries that became Roman cisterns, then rubbish tips, then air-raid shelters in 1943 with the beds and the graffiti still in them. Parts of the route are narrow enough to require a candle and a sideways shuffle.

End on the Vomero. The funicular takes four minutes to climb what would be forty on foot, and the terrace at the top has the bay, the city and the volcano in a single view.

  1. 09:15

    Naples National Archeological Museum

    Historic

    The Alexander Mosaic, the Farnese Hercules and Bull, and room after room of frescoes lifted off Pompeian walls. The Secret Cabinet of erotic objects, locked away for two centuries as too indecent to show, is now simply a gallery with a sign at the door.

  2. 12:00

    Lunch on the way back down

    Eat

    The streets between the museum and the old centre are full of ordinary places doing a fixed lunch for very little. Avoid the block directly outside the museum door.

  3. 13:30

    Napoli Sotteranea

    Culture

    The city under the city: quarry chambers cut by the Greeks, an aqueduct the Romans ran through them, and a wartime shelter at the bottom. Guided only, about ninety minutes, and cold enough to want a layer in August.

  4. 15:45

    Certosa e Museo di San Martino

    Religious

    A Carthusian monastery on the edge of the hill, white and silent after the noise underneath it, with cloisters, a collection of Neapolitan nativity scenes the size of rooms, and the view everybody photographs the city from.

With more time: The Catacombs of San Gennaro, in the northern district of Sanità, are the other underground option: two floors of early Christian burials with fourth century frescoes, run by a local cooperative that trains young people from the neighbourhood as guides.

Day 4 in Naples

The royal city and the bay

The last morning belongs to the other Naples, the one built by kings rather than by everybody at once. The squares down by the water are wide, formal and swept, which after three days in the old centre feels like stepping out of a crowd.

Then walk to the sea. The waterfront road running west is closed to traffic and full of people doing laps of it, which is the most ordinary and most enjoyable thing on offer here.

The station is fifteen minutes back by metro, so an afternoon train is easy.

  1. 09:30

    San Francesco di Paola

    Religious

    A domed church built to look like the Pantheon, closing off the city's main square with a curved colonnade. The square itself was a parade ground and is still big enough to feel empty.

  2. 10:45

    Castel Nuovo

    Historic

    The Angevin castle by the port, five squat towers and, wedged between two of them, a white marble triumphal arch put up to mark an Aragonese king riding in. The contrast between the two is the whole history of the city in one facade.

  3. 12:30

    Coffee and a sfogliatella by the water

    Eat

    Standing at the bar, warm from the oven, in under five minutes. Then the metro back to Centrale.

With more time: Castel dell'Ovo, further along the seafront on its own small peninsula, is free to walk into and has the best view back at the city from sea level. The fishing harbour tucked underneath it is where to eat if you have an evening train instead of an afternoon one.

Before you go

Where to stay

The centro storico, along the three straight Greek streets that still run east to west through it, puts you in the middle of everything and in the middle of the noise. It is the right choice for a short stay if you sleep well; it is genuinely loud until late.

Chiaia, west along the seafront, is the quieter and smarter alternative, twenty minutes on foot or a stop on the metro, with the sea in front of it. Vomero, the hill above, is quieter again and connected by three funiculars. Around the central station is cheap for the obvious reason and not where you want to be walking at two in the morning.

Getting around

The historic centre is walkable and mostly has to be, because the streets are too narrow for anything else and the scooters use the pavement anyway. For the hill, take a funicular rather than a bus. For Pompeii and Herculaneum, take the Circumvesuviana from the lower level of the central station: it is crowded, hot and slow, it is also the usual way there, and pickpockets work it, so keep everything in front of you.

The metro is better than its reputation and several of the stations are genuinely worth seeing on their own account, with commissioned art and escalator shafts that look like the inside of a spaceship. Taxis have fixed fares to common destinations; ask for the tariffa predeterminata and agree it before you get in.

Tickets and timing

Book the Cappella Sansevero. It is a small chapel with a hard limit on numbers and it sells out days ahead, and turning up hopefully is how people miss the best thing in the city.

Pompeii tickets are worth buying online for the time saved at the gate rather than because they sell out. Go early: the site is enormous, almost completely unshaded, and by two in the afternoon in July it is punishing. Churches here often close for several hours in the middle of the day and reopen at four, which catches people out constantly.

Eating

This is where pizza was invented and it is still made to a protected standard: a thin wet middle, a puffed and blistered rim, ninety seconds in a wood oven, eaten with a knife and fork because it will not support itself. It costs about the same as a coffee and a pastry in Milan.

Beyond that, the street food is the thing: fried pizza folded into a parcel, potato croquettes, courgette flowers in batter, and sfogliatella, a shell-shaped pastry of a hundred crisp layers that has to be eaten warm and within about an hour of leaving the oven. Coffee is short, strong, already sugared unless you say otherwise, and drunk standing at the bar.

Naples rewards standing still. The best twenty minutes here are usually a coffee at a bar counter watching an argument that turns out to be a conversation, or a fried pizza eaten on a step, or the moment on the funicular when the city drops away and the bay opens up.

The ruins will still be there in the afternoon. Take the morning slowly.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Naples safe?
For an ordinary visitor, yes, with the ordinary caveats scaled up a little. Petty theft is the real risk and it is concentrated in predictable places: the Circumvesuviana, the streets around the central station after dark, and any crowd. Carry nothing in a back pocket, do not wave a phone about on a scooter-heavy street, and the rest is noise rather than danger.
Pompeii or Herculaneum?
Pompeii if you want the scale of a whole town and have a full day. Herculaneum if you have half a day or dislike walking in heat: it is much smaller, much better preserved, and you can see it properly in two or three hours. Doing both on one trip is a lot of ruins.
Do I need to book anything?
The Cappella Sansevero, days ahead. Napoli Sotterranea runs to fixed tour times and is worth reserving in season. Pompeii tickets online save queueing but rarely sell out. Nothing else here needs planning.
Can I climb Vesuvius?
Yes, and it takes most of a day from Naples: bus or shuttle to the car park at a thousand metres, then a stony half hour walk up to the crater rim. Worth it in clear weather for the view into the cone and back over the bay, pointless in cloud, and it would replace one of these four days rather than fit inside one.
How does Naples compare with Rome or Florence?
It is rougher, cheaper, louder and much less curated. The sights are fewer and the city itself is more of the experience, which is why people who want a tidy holiday sometimes hate it and people who want to be somewhere else keep going back.