Coastal towns
Coastal towns in Campania
28 towns
Towns on the sea. A cliff town high above the water counts here rather than under mountains, because the sea is why you would go.

Camerota
Province: Salerno · 422 m
A Cilento hill town of 422 meters above the Costa degli Infreschi, its caves holding one of the longest prehistoric stratigraphies on the southern Tyrrhenian.

Capaccio Paestum
Province: Salerno · 419 m
Three Doric temples of 550 to 450 BC on the Sele plain, with mozzarella di bufala DOP on the buffalo flats below.

Ravello
Province: Salerno · 365 m
A ridge town above the Amalfi Coast where Wagner found Klingsor's garden in 1880.

Centola
Province: Salerno · 336 m
A Cilento hill village at 336 meters whose seaside frazione carries the name of Aeneas' helmsman.

Tramonti
Province: Salerno · 321 m
The inland side of the Amalfi Coast, thirteen hamlets on the Lattari slopes producing wine and an exported pizza dough.

Furore
Province: Salerno · 300 m
The Amalfi Coast village with no piazza and no center, scattered on rock walls 300 meters above the only fjord in southern Italy.

Castellabate
Province: Salerno · 280 m
A hilltown on a 280-meter Cilento ridge, with a Bandiera Blu beach below and the Benvenuti al Sud film.

Ascea
Province: Salerno · 230 m
Two villages, a hilltown at 230 meters and a Cilento marina, with Parmenides and Zeno's Eleatic school in the ruins of Greek Velia below.

Pisciotta
Province: Salerno · 171 m
A Cilento hilltop town of olive terraces above the Tyrrhenian, where fishermen still pull anchovies with a medieval net.

Conca dei Marini
Province: Salerno · 138 m
A coastal hamlet of 664 people on the Amalfi Coast, home to a monastery pastry and a sea cave that glows green.

Massa Lubrense
Province: Napoli · 121 m
The Sorrentine Peninsula's largest commune by area, stretching from Sorrento across Punta Campanella to the Gulf of Salerno, Capri three miles offshore.

Praiano
Province: Salerno · 120 m
The Amalfi commune between Positano and Amalfi where the doges of the maritime republic kept their summer residences and the Path of the Gods starts.

Piano di Sorrento
Province: Napoli · 96 m
The quieter Sorrentine plain four kilometers from Sorrento, autonomous since 1808, with prehistoric Gaudo pottery and a black-sand marina at the foot of the cliff.

Vico Equense
Province: Napoli · 90 m
The northern gate of the Sorrento peninsula, a clifftop town of ninety meters above the Bay of Napoli.

Vietri sul Mare
Province: Salerno · 80 m
The eastern end of the Amalfi Coast at 80 meters, the ceramics town since the fifteenth century, the gateway between Salerno and the cliff road.

Sorrento
Province: Napoli · 50 m
The Roman Surrentum on a tuff cliff above the Bay of Napoli, sacked by the Turks in 1558.

Ercolano
Province: Napoli · 44 m
Ercolano is the modern town built directly over Herculaneum, the Roman seaside resort buried under 25m of pyroclastic mud in AD 79 rather than the ash that fell on Pompeii, which is why its wood, papyrus, and upper floors survive when no other Roman site's do.

Bacoli
Province: Napoli · 30 m
A town twenty kilometers west of Napoli, the Roman Bauli, where a cistern fed the imperial fleet at Miseno.

Pompei
Province: Napoli · 30 m
The Roman city buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD, dug back up since 1748, and a modern town around Bartolo Longo's 1876 sanctuary.

Positano
Province: Salerno · 30 m
The vertical village of the Amalfi Coast, terraced houses climbing four hundred meters to the Lattari ridge under a tiled Byzantine dome.

Pozzuoli
Province: Napoli · 28 m
A Roman port on a volcanic caldera, the Greek Dicearchia and the Roman Puteoli, where a market's columns first proved that the ground itself rises and falls.

Agropoli
Province: Salerno · 24 m
The gateway commune of the Cilento, a Byzantine acropolis on a promontory taken by the Saracens in 882 as a base for raids on Salerno.

Atrani
Province: Salerno · 21 m
The smallest commune in Italy by area, twelve hectares of stacked houses where the Amalfi Coast pinches shut around a single piazza.

Torre Annunziata
Province: Napoli · 15 m
Capital of Italian pasta in the interwar period and home of the Roman Villa di Poppea, on the bay at the foot of Vesuvius.

Minori
Province: Salerno · 13 m
The smaller of the two Rheginnae, where a first-century Roman maritime villa sits four blocks from the Tyrrhenian beach.

Cetara
Province: Salerno · 10 m
The Amalfi Coast's working tuna and anchovy port, where colatura di alici is still aged in chestnut barrels in the cellars behind the marina.

Amalfi
Province: Salerno · 6 m
The first Italian maritime republic and the coast it named, six meters above the sea between cliffs that close around the duomo's steps.

Maiori
Province: Salerno · 5 m
The Amalfi Coast town with the longest beach and a grid street plan, rebuilt after the 1954 flood took the medieval lanes.
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Five more towns to discover

Cicala
Province: Catanzaro
A village of 887 people at 829 meters, founded in 1616 by farmers asking for land.

Fossombrone
Province: Pesaro e Urbino
An inland Marchigiano town on the Metauro river, layered over a Roman colony with a Renaissance ducal court rising above it.

Bagnoli del Trigno
Province: Isernia
The 'Pearl of Molise', a 637-resident borgo built into and around a massive limestone outcrop above the Trigno valley, with a medieval castle rebuilt on its summit.

Varenna
Province: Lecco
A fishing village founded in 769 on the Lecco arm of Lake Como, with a steep grid of streets falling into the water.

Rocca di Botte
Province: L'Aquila
At 750 meters on the Carseolani slopes between Abruzzo and Lazio, the birthplace of an eleventh-century hermit and a fief of the Colonna.
