The 9 best towns you can reach by train in the province of Napoli

Piano di Sorrento

Why visit Piano di Sorrento

Piano di Sorrento sits at ninety-six meters on the tuff terrace of the Sorrentine peninsula, four kilometers east of Sorrento, thirty kilometers from Napoli. The upper plain has been inhabited since the second millennium BC: pottery and a necropolis from the Gaudo culture were excavated between the frazioni of Trinità and San Massimo.

The town was tied to Sorrento until 1808, when Joseph Bonaparte's reform separated it as an autonomous comune. The local name, Caruotto, comes from the Latin carottum, quarry, after the tuff pits that fed the building of the peninsula.

The Basilica di San Michele Arcangelo, ninth century in origin, was raised to papal basilica status by Benedict XV in 1914 and holds two large inlaid wooden doors. The Villa Fondi de Sangro, a neoclassical 1840 villa above the cliff, now houses the Georges Vallet archaeological museum and faces the Marina di Cassano below.

The marina has black volcanic sand, fishing boats and a small port that still works.

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What to see in Piano di Sorrento

• Basilica di San Michele Arcangelo. Ninth-century church raised to papal basilica status in 1914 by Benedict XV, with large inlaid wooden doors and a baroque interior in the centro of Piano.
• Villa Fondi de Sangro. Neoclassical villa of 1840 above the cliff, now seat of the Museo Archeologico Georges Vallet, with finds from the Massa Lubrense and Sorrento peninsula excavations.
• Marina di Cassano. Small fishing port with black volcanic sand at the foot of the cliff, reached by a steep path from the upper town, still active for inshore fishing.

How to get to Piano di 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 49 minutes away by road.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Pompei

Why visit Pompei

Pompei sits at 30 meters on a volcanic plateau on the south slope of Vesuvius, twenty kilometers from Naples and a hundred meters 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.

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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

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 24 minutes away by road.

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Bacoli

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.

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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

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 31 minutes away by road.

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Nola

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 before June 22 in which eight twenty-five-meter wooden obelisks, each weighing over a ton, are carried through the streets by teams of one hundred bearers.

The festival honors Paolino di Nola, the fifth-century bishop whose return from captivity in North Africa it commemorates. Outside the festival, Nola is a working town of warehouses and commerce.

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What to see in Nola

• Cattedrale di Nola. Cathedral of the Assunta and San Paolino, twentieth-century rebuilt after fire, with relics of the patron bishop who returned from Africa.
• Festa dei Gigli. UNESCO Intangible Heritage festival in June: eight 25-meter wooden obelisks carried through the streets by teams of one hundred bearers.
• Anfiteatro Romano di Nola. Roman amphitheater excavated on the southern edge of town, where Augustus was honored with funeral games in AD 14.

How to get to Nola

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 28 minutes away by road.

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Torre Annunziata

Why visit Torre Annunziata

Torre Annunziata sits at 15 meters on the Bay of Naples, 20 kilometers south of the city at the western foot of Vesuvius, where the Sarno river meets the sea. The Roman town of Oplontis stood here before 79 AD; Villa A, called the Villa di Poppea after Nero's second wife who probably owned it, is the largest of the seafront villas buried by the eruption and the most completely excavated, listed by UNESCO in 1997 with Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The modern town is named for the 1319 watchtower and the chapel of the Annunziata built next to it. From the 17th century the Sarno was channelled to power flour and pasta mills, and by 1900 Torre Annunziata had more than sixty pastifici.

Together with Naples and Gragnano it was called the Capital of the White Art, the term for industrial dried pasta. Setaro and a handful of other small pastifici still produce by traditional bronze die and slow drying.

The town was hit hard by postwar industrial decline and the 1980 Irpinia earthquake.

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What to see in Torre Annunziata

• Scavi di Oplontis - Villa di Poppea. Seafront Roman villa attributed to Nero's wife Poppaea, buried 79 AD, the largest and best-preserved of the Oplontis villas, UNESCO-listed 1997.
• Basilica della Madonna della Neve. Sixteenth-century shrine of the Madonna della Neve, the patron of the town, rebuilt after 18th-century earthquakes.
• Torre dell'Annunziata. Fourteenth-century watchtower for which the town is named, built 1319 to guard against Saracen raids on the Vesuvian coast.

How to get to Torre Annunziata

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 22 minutes away by road.

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Ercolano

Why visit Ercolano

The eruption of AD 79 treated the two Roman towns differently. Pompeii took 3 to 4 metres of ash, hot enough to scorch organic material but not to seal it.

Herculaneum, closer to the mountain and down at the shore, was hit by repeated pyroclastic surges and ended up under a mud flow that cooled hard around everything it touched: roofs, furniture, scrolls, upper floors. That difference in burial is the reason one site kept its wood and the other did not: the carbonised wooden screen of the House of the Wooden Partition, the wooden bed in the House of the Carbonised Furniture, and the second-storey overhangs are all here because the mud sealed rather than scorched them.

The site was named UNESCO World Heritage in 1997, jointly with Pompeii and Torre Annunziata. The suburban villa attributed to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, once stood on the ancient seafront, now buried well inland under the weight of the deposit.

Inside it, roughly 1,800 carbonised papyrus scrolls were recovered, including the entire Epicurean philosophical library of Philodemus of Gadara. That find, the largest single ancient library ever recovered, is still being unrolled with multispectral imaging at the Officina dei Papiri Ercolanesi in Naples, and it is the building the J.

Paul Getty Museum in Malibu replicated 1:1 as its main structure. Along the old shoreline nearby, the arched boathouses hold the remains of 300 fugitives killed by the 500 degree pyroclastic surge while they waited for a rescue that never reached them, discovered in the 1980s and 1990s and now the most-photographed image of that moment.

The modern town sits directly on top of the ancient one, 50,000 people on the lower slopes of the volcano, with the excavated ruins sunk below current street level in a pit at the centre of things. Excavation has gone on since 1738, when Charles of Bourbon began it, and continues piecemeal now.

To the east, the ground rises toward the national park and the Gran Cono crater, reached by a half-day hike from the upper car park with reservation required. To the west, the road along the old Golden Mile strings 122 Bourbon-era villas, built between the 1730s and 1820s by the Naples aristocracy, toward the coast; Villa Campolieto, designed by Vanvitelli in 1763 and now a cultural centre, and Villa Favorita, a former royal residence, are the ones open to visitors.

Upper slope, buried town, and shoreline road are three bands of the same landscape, each shaped by proximity to the same mountain. The town's food follows the same geology: spaghetti alle vongole, mozzarella di bufala, pomodorino del piennolo del Vesuvio DOP grown on the volcanic slopes, and Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio DOC red and white from vineyards on the same soil.

What holds the place together is that the volcano is not backdrop here. It is the reason the ruins are intact, the reason the villas needed a gateway road, and the reason the food tastes the way it does.

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What to see in Ercolano

• Parco Archeologico di Ercolano (UNESCO). Wooden screens, beds, and second-storey balconies stand in place, sealed by the mud rather than reduced by it. Walking the excavated streets means walking below the level of the modern town, which sits on top of what the mud buried.
• Villa dei Papiri. A 100m-long suburban villa attributed to Caesar's father-in-law, its rooms opening onto what was once the ancient seafront, now well inland of the shore under the weight of volcanic deposit.
• Boathouse skeletons. 300 fugitives killed while sheltering in the arches along the old shoreline, waiting for a rescue that the surge outran. Found in the 1980s, the arches are left much as they were uncovered.

How to get to Ercolano

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 16 minutes away by road.

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Pozzuoli

Why visit Pozzuoli

Pozzuoli sits at twenty-eight meters on the rim of the Campi Flegrei caldera, fifteen kilometers west of Napoli. Greek refugees from Samos founded the city in 531 BC as Dicearchia; Rome took it in 195 BC and renamed it Puteoli, a name the port kept through its centuries as Rome's busiest gateway by sea.

The old town and the working town are not the same ground. Rione Terra, the headland acropolis, was the city center for both the Greek and Roman settlements before it was evacuated in 1970 and reopened only piece by piece since.

The rest of Pozzuoli has grown around and below it, on a caldera that does not hold still: the crater above town still vents sulfur, and the crust beneath the whole area continues its slow rise and fall, watched closely enough that the alert level was raised again in 2023. A port city built its wealth on ground that was always going to move under it, and the town's oldest quarter has spent the last half century learning to live with that fact rather than escape it.

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What to see in Pozzuoli

• Anfiteatro Flavio. The cage chambers and lift machinery beneath the arena floor survive largely intact, giving a rare view of how the underground works of a Roman amphitheater actually functioned.
• Macellum (Tempio di Serapide). A market building long misread as a temple to Serapis. The three marked columns still stand at the center of the floor, close enough to touch.
• Rione Terra. The headland acropolis and original old town, evacuated in 1970 after a bradyseismic crisis and reopened only in stages since.

How to get to Pozzuoli

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 25 minutes away by road.

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