The 9 best towns with a serious restaurant in the province of Napoli

1. Capri

homes €7,200 to €11,000 a m² in the center · 6,722 people

Why visit Capri

Capri sits at 142 meters above the Marina Grande harbor on the eastern half of the ten-square-kilometer island that bears its name, divided between two communes. The town wraps around the Piazzetta, formally Piazza Umberto I, the social center of the island since the funicular replaced the donkey path in 1907.

Tiberius ruled the Roman Empire from here for the last ten years of his life, from twelve villas that Tacitus counted; the ruins of Villa Jovis still stand on the northeastern cape at 334 meters. The Faraglioni, three limestone stacks off the southern coast, rise to 109 meters; the middle one has an arched tunnel through it.

Capri is overwhelmed by day-trippers from June through September. After the last ferry leaves at six in the evening the island returns to its six thousand residents, and the Belvedere of Tragara becomes quiet again.

Le Monzù (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Da Tonino (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Terrazza Tiberio (MICHELIN) and 7 more places are listed in food guides.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €11,000 a m².

What to see in Capri

• Villa Jovis. Ruins of Tiberius's imperial villa on Monte Tiberio at 334 meters, the largest of his twelve Capri villas, abandoned after AD 37.
• Piazzetta (Piazza Umberto I). Small square at the heart of Capri town, social hub of the island since 1907 when the funicular replaced the donkey path.
• Belvedere di Tragara. Panoramic terrace at the end of Via Tragara, looking down on the three Faraglioni stacks rising from the southern sea.

Everything we know about Capri

2. Anacapri

Best for olive oil. It belongs to the national association of olive oil towns.

homes €5,300 to €8,100 a m² in the center · 6,757 people

Why visit Anacapri

Anacapri occupies the western, higher plateau of Capri, about 150 meters above the harbor town, at 275 meters at the municipal center 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 (MICHELIN and La Liste), Da Gelsomina (MICHELIN), Il Riccio (MICHELIN) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €8,100 a m².

What to see in Anacapri

• Villa San Michele. Neoclassical villa and garden with an antiquities collection and a granite Sphinx set over the harbor, 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.

Everything we know about Anacapri

3. Massa Lubrense

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

1 h 9 min from Naples · homes €3,000 to €4,600 a m² in the center · 14,186 people

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 (Locali Storici and Gambero Rosso), Quattro Passi (MICHELIN and L'Espresso), Relais Blu (MICHELIN) and 6 more places are listed in food guides.

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

Naples is about 1 h 9 min away by road.

Everything we know about Massa Lubrense

4. Sorrento

Best for Limone di Sorrento IGP. The town gives its name to Limone di Sorrento IGP.

57 min from Naples · homes €4,200 to €6,900 a m² in the center · 15,152 people

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 15,152. 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 (Locali Storici), Ristorante O' Parrucchiano (Locali Storici), Terrazza Bosquet (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and 8 more places are listed in food guides.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €6,900 a m².

What to see in Sorrento

• Duomo di Sorrento. Eleventh-century cathedral, rebuilt in 1573 after the Ottoman raid, with a Baroque interior, a 1924 neo-Gothic façade 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

It has its own railway station. Naples is about 57 min away by road. The full route from Naples.

Everything we know about Sorrento

5. Forio

Best for everyday life on foot. Eight of the ten everyday services we look for are mapped within 500 meters of the center.

homes €2,550 to €3,900 a m² in the center · 17,531 people

Why visit Forio

Forio sits at 18 meters on the western coast of Ischia, the largest commune of the island by area and the second by population. Seventeen towers, built between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries to defend against Saracen raids, are scattered through the town and surrounding countryside, with the largest anchoring the old center and the rest marking the line where the built town gives way to open countryside.

The coast runs from the northern bay below the church of San Francesco di Paola down to the western beaches at Citara, where the volcanic sand faces the only sunset on the island. Inland and above, the hillside terrain that drew a composer to build and plant runs down toward the thermal springs feeding the pools near the shore.

The commune reads as a string of distinct pieces, defensive towers, a promontory church, a garden hillside, a thermal coast, held together less by a single center than by the shared western exposure that lights the water each evening.

Il Saturnino (MICHELIN) and Il Mirto (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) are listed in food guides.

What to see in Forio

• Chiesa del Soccorso. White walls on a promontory catch the light over the sea, the church mixing Moorish, Byzantine and Mediterranean elements in its rebuilding.
• Il Torrione. Fifteenth-century defensive tower in the centro storico, largest of the seventeen Forio towers, now a small museum and viewpoint.
• Giardini La Mortella. Susana Walton built the garden on the hillside her husband William composed on, terraces of subtropical species climbing the slope above the town.

Everything we know about Forio

6. Vico Equense

Best for a trip without a car. The train stops in the commune.

55 min from Naples · homes €3,000 to €5,800 a m² in the center · 20,198 people

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 in the Angevin era, when a fortress built between 1284 and 1289, by tradition for Charles II, rose on the cliff as both stronghold and residence, and the diocese's cathedral followed on a neighboring clifftop early in the next 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 (MICHELIN and La Liste), Antica Osteria Nonna Rosa (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso), Cannavacciuolo Countryside (MICHELIN) and 8 more places are listed in food guides.

The catch: Homes in the center cost up to €5,800 a m².

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, by tradition for 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

It has its own railway station. Naples is about 55 min away by road. The full route from Naples.

Everything we know about Vico Equense

7. Pompei

Best for a World Heritage site. UNESCO lists a site in the comune.

24 min from Naples · homes €2,150 to €3,300 a m² in the center · 23,647 people

Why visit Pompei

Pompei sits at 30 meters on a volcanic plateau on the south slope of Vesuvius, twenty kilometers from Naples and a few kilometers inland from where the Sarno meets the sea. The Roman city was buried under five to six meters of ash and lapilli when the volcano erupted on 24 October 79 AD, killing the part of the population that had not already left.

Excavations began in 1748 under the Bourbons and have never stopped; the site has been UNESCO-listed since 1997 alongside Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata, and is the third most visited archaeological site in the world. Modern Pompei was founded in 1881 by the lawyer Bartolo Longo, who built the Santuario della Beata Vergine del Rosario as a center for pilgrimage and social work.

The basilica with its 80-meter campanile and the surrounding grid of streets are entirely a creation of the 1880s, separate from the dig and laid over fields that had been farmland until then.

President (MICHELIN), Cosmo Restaurant (MICHELIN), Capasanta (MICHELIN) and 1 more place are listed in food guides.

What to see in Pompei

• Parco Archeologico di Pompei. The Roman city buried in 79 AD and excavated since 1748, UNESCO-listed since 1997, with the Forum, the Villa dei Misteri and the Lupanare.
• Santuario della Beata Vergine del Rosario. Pontifical basilica built between 1876 and 1891 by the lawyer Bartolo Longo, the heart of modern Pompei and a pilgrimage site of four million a year.
• Casa del Fauno. Roman patrician house in the dig with a bronze faun at its center and the Alexander Mosaic floor depicting Issus, now in the Naples museum.

How to get to Pompei

It has its own railway station. Naples is about 24 min away by road. The full route from Naples.

Everything we know about Pompei

8. Bacoli

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

31 min from Naples · homes €1,800 to €2,750 a m² in the center · 24,988 people

Why visit Bacoli

Bacoli sits at thirty meters on the western lobe of the Campi Flegrei, looking onto Lake Miseno and its headland across the Bay of Pozzuoli. The Romans called it Bauli.

In the late Republic and early Empire it was a resort lined with the villas of senators and emperors, and the fleet base nearby, the Classis Misenensis, was the largest in the Mediterranean. Most of that infrastructure is still here, scattered through the residential blocks that now fill the town, so that a cistern or a cistern complex turns up between apartment buildings rather than in an isolated park.

The town's two promontories divide its Roman past between them: the harbor side toward Miseno, where the fleet and its water supply were based, and the Baia side, where the villas and the later Aragonese castle stand. Bacoli is also an active geothermal zone, and bradyseism, the slow rise and fall of the Campi Flegrei coastline, is still measurable here, the same force that put the Roman villas at Baia underwater.

What survives above ground and what has sunk below the sea are the same story of ground that will not stay still.

Caracol (MICHELIN and L'Espresso), Riccio Restaurant (MICHELIN), Aguglia osteria di mare 2021 (Gambero Rosso) and 2 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Bacoli

• Piscina Mirabilis. Forty-eight cross-shaped pillars hold up the roof in rows, the scale meant to be walked through rather than read about, still standing among the residential blocks that have grown up around it.
• Cento Camerelle. Second cistern complex four hundred meters from the Piscina Mirabilis, on two superimposed levels, locally called the Prisons of Nero.
• Castello Aragonese di Baia. Late-fifteenth-century Aragonese fortress on the Baia promontory, since 1993 the seat of the Museo Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei.

How to get to Bacoli

It has its own railway station. Naples is about 31 min away by road. The full route from Naples.

Everything we know about Bacoli

9. Nola

Best for a day out from Naples. It is 28 min by car.

28 min from Naples · homes €1,350 to €2,050 a m² in the center · 34,111 people

Why visit Nola

Nola sits at 34 meters on the plain between Vesuvius and the Apennines, twenty kilometers east of Napoli. It was an Oscan and Samnite town before Rome, and the place where Augustus died in AD 14, in the same house his father had died in.

Giordano Bruno was born here in 1548, the Nolano who called his philosophy nolana before he was burned at the Campo de' Fiori in 1600. The town is best known today for the Festa dei Gigli, a UNESCO Intangible Heritage celebration on the Sunday after June 22 in which eight twenty-five-meter wooden obelisks, each weighing over two tonnes, are carried through the streets by teams of about 128 bearers.

The festival honors Paolino di Nola, the fifth-century bishop whose return from captivity, as the legend tells it, the townspeople greeted with lilies. Outside the festival, Nola is a working town of warehouses and commerce.

Re Santi e Leoni (MICHELIN and L'Espresso), Le Baccanti (MICHELIN), Rear Restaurant (MICHELIN and Gambero Rosso) and 2 more places are listed in food guides.

What to see in Nola

• Cattedrale di Nola. Cathedral of the Assunta and San Paolino, rebuilt between 1869 and 1909 after the fire of 1861, with relics of the patron bishop.
• Festa dei Gigli. UNESCO Intangible Heritage festival in June: eight 25-meter wooden obelisks carried through the streets by teams of about 128 bearers.
• Anfiteatro Romano di Nola. Roman amphitheater of the first century BC, 138 by 108 meters, about a third of it excavated, open to visitors by booking.

How to get to Nola

It has its own railway station. Naples is about 28 min away by road. The full route from Naples.

Everything we know about Nola