The 6 best beach towns with a serious restaurant in Campania

Pisciotta

Why visit Pisciotta

The hill the town occupies rises between Ascea and Palinuro, part of the strictest zone of the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park, and the ridge gives the stone houses of the centro storico a clear line of sight to Capo Palinuro twelve kilometers south. The town's parts sit at different elevations doing different work: the historic core holds the ridge at 171 meters, the olive terraces cover the slopes below it, and Marina di Pisciotta occupies the shore at the foot of the hill, where the fishing boats go out.

The menaica net worked by the Marina's fishermen is a technique once widespread around the Mediterranean and now reduced to a few coves, of which this is one. Carlo Pisacane's failed 1857 revolutionary expedition landed at Sapri and was crushed nearby; the Cilento coast keeps the memory in plaques and processions rather than in any structure at Pisciotta itself.

What holds the town together is elevation: everything of note here, the anchovies, the olives, the beach, the ridge, is defined by how far it sits above or below that 171-meter line.

Angiolina, Perbacco have been named by a guide.

What to see in Pisciotta

• Centro storico di Pisciotta. Hilltop medieval core of stone houses on a ridge 171 meters above the sea, with a clear sightline to Capo Palinuro.
• Marina di Pisciotta. Fishing port at the foot of the hill, departure point for the last menaica anchovy boats on the coast, its beach holding the Blue Flag.
• Uliveti di Pisciottana. Terraces holding trees of considerable age, the source groves of the Cilento DOP extra-virgin oil.

How to get to Pisciotta

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Salerno is roughly 138 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Pisciotta

Positano

Why visit Positano

Positano is built on the rugged limestone of the Lattari Mountains, which is why locals call it the città verticale: the ground itself will not allow a level street in the centro storico, and every path either climbs or descends. The settlement grew from the ninth century around the Benedictine monastery that kept the icon, and the frazione of Nocelle above the town shows how far the climb goes, linked to the coast below by the ridge trail rather than by road.

After being sacked by Pisa in the thirteenth century, the town fortified itself with watchtowers and prospered as a small fish-trading port, a working settlement long before it was a resort. The twentieth century made it a writer's refuge: John Steinbeck described it in Harper's Bazaar in 1953 as a dream place that isn't quite real.

Today Positano runs almost entirely on summer tourism, with a UNESCO Amalfi Coast inscription and a Bandiera Blu beach. The vertical geography that once forced fishermen and monks onto narrow terraces is the same feature now sold as a view: the town's difficulty of ground became its main asset.

Li Galli, Zass, Next2 and 7 more have been named by a guide.

What to see in Positano

• Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta. Majolica tiled dome over the church around which the village grew, the icon inside marking the spot where the sailors are said to have set the Madonna down.
• Spiaggia Grande. Main pebble beach below the centro storico, the postcard image of the Amalfi Coast, with the pastel facades of the village rising directly above the sand.
• Sentiero degli Dei. Path of the Gods, the high ridge trail of the Monti Lattari from Agerola to Nocelle, a frazione of Positano, with the Faraglioni of Capri offshore.

How to get to Positano

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Salerno is roughly 54 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Positano

Anacapri

Why visit Anacapri

Anacapri occupies the western, higher plateau of Capri, about 150 meters above the harbour town, at 275 meters at the municipal centre and rising to 589 at Monte Solaro. The Ancient Greek prefix ana means up: the name simply says the upper one.

Until 1874 the only link between the two communes was a stairway of some 800 steps, cut by Greek settlers in the seventh or sixth century BC, not by Phoenicians despite what its common name suggests. In 1895 the Swedish physician Axel Munthe began building his villa on the ledge above those steps, on the ruins of one of Tiberius's residences and a tenth-century chapel.

His 1929 memoir turned the place into a literary destination. The two communes of Capri, one at sea level and one on the plateau above, were for centuries connected only by that stair cut into the rock, and a settlement reachable only on foot from its lower twin is a different kind of place than one arrived at by road.

L'Olivo, Da Gelsomina, Il Riccio and 2 more have been named by a guide.

What to see in Anacapri

• Villa San Michele. Neoclassical villa and garden with an antiquities collection and a granite Sphinx set over the harbour, facing east toward Vesuvius.
• Monte Solaro. Reached by a single-seat chairlift from Piazza Vittoria, the summit opens onto views across the whole of Capri.
• Faro di Punta Carena. Second-tallest lighthouse in Italy, built in 1862 and operational since 1867, at the southwestern tip of the island.

How to get to Anacapri

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving.

Everything we know about Anacapri

Massa Lubrense

Why visit Massa Lubrense

Massa Lubrense holds the western tip of the Sorrentine Peninsula, the largest municipal area on the peninsula and the closest land to Capri, three nautical miles across the Bocche di Capri. The hilltop centro sits at 121 meters; the commune's eighteen frazioni spread between the Tyrrhenian and the Gulf of Salerno, including Termini, Nerano, Sant'Agata sui Due Golfi and the Marina della Lobra.

Punta Campanella, the cape at the end, has the remains of a Roman sanctuary of Athena and a sixteenth-century watchtower against Saracen raids; the surrounding sea is a protected marine area established in 1997. The commune holds a Bandiera Blu, a Spiga Verde, and Città dell'Olio status: the Penisola Sorrentina DOP olive groves climb the hills above the bays.

Spaghetti alla Nerano, courgette and provolone del Monaco, is the dish that came out of these kitchens in the 1950s.

Ristorante Antico Francischiello da Peppino, Quattro Passi, Relais Blu and 6 more have been named by a guide.

What to see in Massa Lubrense

• Punta Campanella. Cape at the western tip of the peninsula, with the ruins of a Roman sanctuary of Athena, a watchtower, and the marine reserve established in 1997.
• Marina del Cantone. Pebble bay at Nerano, Italy's largest pebble beach by some measures and the kitchen where spaghetti alla Nerano was created.
• Chiesa di Santa Maria della Lobra. Sixteenth-century mother church above the small Marina della Lobra, with a wooden coffered ceiling and a former Franciscan convent attached.

How to get to Massa Lubrense

There is no station we could confirm here, so this one means driving. Napoli is roughly 69 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Massa Lubrense

Sorrento

Why visit Sorrento

Sorrento sits on a block of tuff cliff fifty meters above the Bay of Napoli, thirty kilometers from the city by Circumvesuviana railway or ferry. The town began as a Greek foundation and became the Roman Surrentum, a resort favored by senators.

The current population is 15,407. The old town sits above, gathered around the Duomo and the cloister of San Francesco a few minutes apart, while Marina Grande lies below the cliff, reached through the ancient Greek gate, its harbor still working and its trattorie facing the bay.

Terraces of lemon groves ring the slopes above town, the same femminello sorrentino IGP fruit that supplies the limoncello sold through the centro storico. Piazza Tasso, at the head of the old town, is where Corso Italia begins and where the statue of Torquato Tasso stands; the poet was baptized in the cathedral below.

A cliff town facing the bay, its upper streets given to churches and squares, its lower shore to fishing and the harbor, and its surrounding slopes turned over entirely to the lemon that still funds much of what happens in between.

Ristorante O' Canonico 1898, Ristorante O' Parrucchiano, Terrazza Bosquet and 8 more have been named by a guide.

What to see in Sorrento

• Duomo di Sorrento. Eleventh-century cathedral rebuilt in Romanesque style in the fifteenth century, with a baroque interior and the baptistery where Torquato Tasso was christened.
• Chiostro di San Francesco. Fourteenth-century cloister of tuff arches and crossed columns, the marble façade redone in 1926, still used for civic weddings and chamber concerts.
• Museo Correale di Terranova. Decorative arts museum in a seventeenth-century villa opened in 1924, with Neapolitan porcelain, period furniture and seventeenth-century painting.

How to get to Sorrento

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Napoli is roughly 57 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Sorrento

Vico Equense

Why visit Vico Equense

Vico Equense sits on a block of tuff and limestone above the Bay of Napoli, twenty-five kilometers from the city and the first town on the Sorrento peninsula coming from the north. A seventh-century BC pre-Roman necropolis predates the Latin Aequana that Roman patricians built here for their villas, and the finds from that older settlement, funerary objects excavated in the 1960s and 1970s, sit now in a museum founded in 1966.

The medieval town that survives was walled by the Angevins after 1284, when Charles II ordered a fortress built on the cliff as both stronghold and residence, and the diocese's cathedral rose on a neighboring clifftop in the same century, before losing its status as a see in 1818. Behind the town, the limestone mass of the Lattari range closes off the land side, reached since 1952 by cable car from the coast at Castellammare.

Pizza by the meter, the town's best-known export, was invented here by Luigi Dell'Amura, called Gigino, in the 1930s, and his restaurant in the centro still serves it. What holds the town together is the sequence itself: a pre-Roman settlement, a Roman villa town, an Angevin fortress and a bishopric, and finally a twentieth-century dish, each layer built on a narrow shelf of rock between the mountain and the bay.

Torre del Saracino, Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa, Cannavacciuolo Countryside and 8 more have been named by a guide.

What to see in Vico Equense

• Chiesa dell'Annunziata. The church stands at the edge of the cliff, its Gothic interior at odds with the Baroque face it was given later. The old cathedral of a diocese that no longer has a seat here.
• Castello Giusso. Angevin castle built between 1284 and 1289 at the order of Charles II of Anjou, with a Renaissance residential wing and gardens above the bay.
• Antiquarium Silio Italico. Archaeological museum founded in 1966, with funerary objects from a seventh-century BC pre-Roman necropolis excavated in the 1960s and 1970s.

How to get to Vico Equense

There is a railway station in the town, so you can arrive without a car and never need one while you are here. Napoli is roughly 55 minutes away by road.

Everything we know about Vico Equense