The Most Beautiful Places in Campania
29 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Campania are Positano, Royal Palace of Caserta and Faraglioni of Capri. The list covers 29 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Campania owes much of its character to fire. Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields made its soil fertile and its coast dramatic, and that same volcanism buried and preserved whole Roman towns. Greek colonists founded Neapolis and Poseidonia here, wealthy Romans built villas around the Bay of Naples, and later Naples became the capital of a kingdom with the palaces and charterhouses to match.
Mount Vesuvius looms over the bay it devastated in AD 79, when its eruption covered Pompeii in ash and left streets, houses and wall paintings in place. Paestum, the Greek Poseidonia, keeps three great Doric temples standing in open fields, and at Bacoli the Piscina Mirabilis, a vast vaulted Roman cistern, supplied the fleet at Misenum.
The Bourbon kings left the Royal Palace of Caserta, designed by Luigi Vanvitelli, and the Caroline Aqueduct that brought water to its fountains over a bridge of three tiers of arches. In the Vallo di Diano, the Certosa di Padula spreads around one of the largest cloisters in Europe, while the Certosa di San Martino looks down over Naples. Beneath the city lie the early Christian Catacombs of San Gennaro and the skull-filled Fontanelle cemetery; above ground, the Galleria Umberto I raises its glass dome, and the Toledo metro station sinks a shaft of blue mosaic light into the street below.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Positano | Most beautiful village | |
| 2 | Royal Palace of Caserta | Palace | ✓ |
| 3 | Faraglioni of Capri | Rock formation | |
| 4 | Villa Cimbrone | Historic garden | |
| 5 | Blue Grotto, Capri | Cave | |
| 6 | Cappella Sansevero | Church building | |
| 7 | Fiordo di Furore | Fjord | |
| 8 | Pompeii | Archaeological site | |
| 9 | Mount Vesuvius | Volcano | |
| 10 | Capri | Island | |
| 11 | Teatro di San Carlo | Opera house | |
| 12 | Certosa di Padula | Carthusian monastery | ✓ |
| 13 | Paestum | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 14 | Herculaneum | Ruins | ✓ |
| 15 | Galleria Umberto I | Covered passageway | |
| 16 | Certosa di San Martino | Carthusian monastery | |
| 17 | Caroline Aqueduct (Aqueduct of Vanvitelli) | Aqueduct | ✓ |
| 18 | Amalfi Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 19 | Villa of the Mysteries | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 20 | Catacombs of San Gennaro | Catacombs | |
| 21 | Aragonese Castle | Castle | |
| 22 | Baia | Abandoned village | |
| 23 | Fontanelle cemetery | Catacombs | |
| 24 | Toledo | Railway station | |
| 25 | Piscina Mirabilis | Reservoir | |
| 26 | Arco Naturale | Natural arch | |
| 27 | Farnese Hercules | Sculpture | |
| 28 | Suburban Baths, Herculaneum | Thermae | ✓ |
| 29 | Veiled Christ | Sculpture |
01 Positano
Italy · 25 km from Salerno40.628° N 14.482° E
Image by floydbarbel from Pixabay Positano is a village that falls down a mountain into the sea.
Did you know? A chain of medieval watchtowers, including the 13th-century Torre della Sponda, guarded Positano's coves against Saracen raids.
02 Royal Palace of Caserta
Reggia di Caserta
Italy · 1.7 km from Caserta41.073° N 14.327° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by libellule789 from Pixabay The Royal Palace of Caserta was built to rival Versailles, and in sheer size it outdoes almost every royal house of the eighteenth century.
Did you know? Vanvitelli published his designs in 1756 as a volume of engraved plates, so the palace was famous on paper long before it was built.
03 Faraglioni of Capri
Faraglioni di Capri
Italy · 33.3 km from Naples40.542° N 14.253° E
Image by MonikaP from Pixabay The Faraglioni are three limestone stacks rising straight out of the sea off the south-eastern tip of Capri, and they have been the emblem of the island for as long as painters have come here. Each has its own name. Stella, the one still joined to the island, is about 109 metres high.
Did you know? Stella is tied to Capri by an isthmus only about four metres wide, and a grotto with green-blue water opens on its south-western side.
04 Villa Cimbrone
Italy · 14.1 km from Salerno40.643° N 14.610° E
Image by luckysilver1 from Pixabay High on the ridge of Ravello, at the end of a footpath out of the town, the gardens of Villa Cimbrone end at a balustrade that seems to hang in mid-air.
Did you know? Lord Grimthorpe died in London in 1917, and his body was brought back to Ravello to be buried in his garden.
05 Blue Grotto, Capri
Grotta Azzurra
Italy · 31.4 km from Naples40.561° N 14.205° E
Elenagm · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Blue Grotto is a sea cave on the coast of Capri that seems to be lit from below. Its entrance is a hole in the cliff barely 2 m wide and about 1 m high at low tide, but inside it opens into a chamber some 60 m long and 25 m wide.
Did you know? Pliny the Elder mentioned a Triton playing a shell off Capri, and the armless Triton raised from the cave may be the statue he described.
06 Cappella Sansevero
Italy · 1.3 km from Naples40.849° N 14.255° E
David Sivyer · CC BY-SA 2.0 Hidden in a narrow street of Naples' historic centre, the Cappella Sansevero holds one of the most astonishing sculptures of the 18th century: the Veiled Christ, carved by Giuseppe Sanmartino in 1753.
Did you know? One recent theory links the chapel's founding to the 1590 murder of Fabrizio Carafa by the composer Carlo Gesualdo, Carafa's mother being married into the Sangro family.
07 Fiordo di Furore
Italy · 19.7 km from Salerno40.614° N 14.554° E
Ugeorge · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Fiordo di Furore is a narrow cleft in the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, so deep and so tight that the sea seems to run straight into the mountain.
Did you know? A calcara, a traditional lime kiln once used to produce lime for local building, also survives in the fjord.
08 Pompeii
Pompei
Italy · 23.2 km from Naples40.751° N 14.490° E
Glen Scarborough from The Central Coast, Australia · CC BY 2.0 Pompeii is the most complete picture we have of an ordinary Roman town, and it owes that to the catastrophe that ended it. In AD 79 Vesuvius, about 8 km away, erupted for two days.
Did you know? Archaeologists have identified more than thirty bakeries, many fitted with lava-stone mills and wood-fired ovens.
09 Mount Vesuvius
Vesuvio
Italy · 15.8 km from Naples40.823° N 14.429° E
Image by stostank from Pixabay Vesuvius rises from the shore of the Gulf of Naples about 9 km east of the city, and its profile explains its history.
Did you know? Near Nola in 2001, archaeologists found thousands of human footprints left by villagers fleeing north from an eruption about 3,800 years ago.
10 Capri
Isola di Capri
Italy · 32.4 km from Naples40.550° N 14.233° E
Image by babusz from Pixabay Capri is a limestone island of just over 10 square kilometres at the southern entrance to the Gulf of Naples, about 5 km off the tip of the Sorrento Peninsula.
11 Teatro di San Carlo
Italy · 0.8 km from Naples40.837° N 14.250° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Naples' royal opera house opened on 4 November 1737, the name day of its patron, the Bourbon king Charles, with Domenico Sarro's Achille in Sciro.
Did you know? At the opening night the hero Achilles was sung by a woman, the contralto Vittoria Tesi, as was customary at the time.
12 Certosa di Padula
Italy · 36.1 km from Potenza40.337° N 15.652° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by gvizzari0 from Pixabay The Certosa di San Lorenzo at Padula, in the Vallo di Diano of southern Campania, is the largest charterhouse in Italy and one of the grandest in Europe: about 51,500 square metres of cloisters, gardens, courtyards and some 320 rooms, spread out at the foot of the hill town of Padula.
Did you know? The church's wooden choir stalls, carved in the early 1500s, are inlaid with saints, landscapes and architectural scenes, including 36 New Testament episodes.
13 Paestum
Italy · 34.9 km from Salerno40.423° N 15.006° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by SCAPIN from Pixabay Paestum, on the plain south of Salerno, has three Greek temples in the Doric order that are among the best preserved anywhere, standing in open fields inside an almost complete ring of ancient walls.
Did you know? The Tomb of the Diver, found on 3 June 1968, is the only Greek painting with figures from the Archaic or Classical era known to survive complete.
14 Herculaneum
Scavi archeologici di Ercolano
Italy · 9.7 km from Naples40.806° N 14.348° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Stormydog101 from Pixabay Herculaneum was a small, wealthy seaside town of perhaps 5,000 people on the Bay of Naples, and in AD 79 the eruption of Vesuvius buried it under some 20 metres of hot volcanic material.
15 Galleria Umberto I
Italy · 0.7 km from Naples40.838° N 14.249° E
Miguel Hermoso Cuesta · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Galleria Umberto I is Naples's answer to Milan's great arcade: a cross-shaped street of shops and cafés roofed in iron and glass, standing directly opposite the Teatro di San Carlo and opening onto Via Toledo.
Did you know? The neighbourhood it replaced had suffered nine cholera epidemics between 1835 and 1884, which drove the decision to tear it down.
16 Certosa di San Martino
Italy · 0.2 km from Naples40.843° N 14.241° E
Pinotto992 · Public domain On the crest of the Vomero hill, beside Castel Sant'Elmo, the Certosa di San Martino looks down over the whole of Naples and its gulf. Together the castle and the charterhouse form the city's most visible skyline landmark.
Did you know? Beneath the monastery, Gothic pillars carry pointed vaults more than 15 metres high, now home to about 150 sculptures and inscriptions from the 13th–17th centuries.
17 Caroline Aqueduct (Aqueduct of Vanvitelli)
Acquedotto Carolino
Italy · 5.4 km from Caserta41.059° N 14.402° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
F. Patturelli · Public domain The Aqueduct of Vanvitelli, known in Italy as the Acquedotto Carolino, was built to bring water to the Bourbon palace at Caserta, and its showpiece is a bridge of tufa that strides across the Valle di Maddaloni on three tiers of arches. 8 metres at its highest point.
Did you know? Besides fountains and mills, the water fed experiments in growing exotic plants brought back to Europe by scientific expeditions from the colonies.
18 Amalfi Cathedral
Duomo di Amalfi
Italy · 15 km from Salerno40.634° N 14.603° E
Luca Aless · CC BY-SA 3.0 At the head of the Piazza del Duomo in Amalfi, a facade of striped stone and marble, glittering mosaics and pointed arches fills the end of the piazza.
Did you know? The bell tower's top is a central drum ringed by four smaller turrets, and building it took more than a century from 1180.
19 Villa of the Mysteries
Villa dei Misteri
Italy · 22.1 km from Naples40.754° N 14.477° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Maarten Heerlien from Voorschoten, The Netherlands · CC BY 2.0 Outside the walls of Pompeii, on a slope that once looked out over the Bay of Naples, lies the house that holds the most famous painted room of the ancient world.
Did you know? After the earthquake of 62 AD the villa was converted into a farm with its own wine press.
20 Catacombs of San Gennaro
Catacombe di San Gennaro
Italy · 2.5 km from Naples40.864° N 14.248° E
Dominik Matus · CC BY-SA 4.0 Beneath the slope that climbs from the Sanità district to Capodimonte in northern Naples lies the largest Christian catacomb complex in southern Italy.
Did you know? Neapolitan bishops continued to be buried here until the 11th century.
21 Aragonese Castle
Castello aragonese
Italy · 26.5 km from Naples40.732° N 13.965° E
Image by itiner from Pixabay The Aragonese Castle seems to grow out of the sea: a great volcanic rock, 113 metres high, rising off the east coast of Ischia and crowned with walls, bastions, domes and the ruins of churches.
Did you know? Since the 1970s a lift has carried visitors about 60 metres up through the rock to the upper levels of the fortress.
22 Baia
Italy · 14.9 km from Naples40.817° N 14.070° E
Joseph Meyer · Public domain Two thousand years ago the shore of Baia was the most fashionable stretch of coast in the Roman world.
Did you know? The dome of the so-called Temple of Mercury, about 21.5 m wide, was the world's largest until Rome's Pantheon was completed.
23 Fontanelle cemetery
Cimitero delle Fontanelle
Italy · 1.8 km from Naples40.858° N 14.239° E
Lalupa · CC BY-SA 3.0 Rows of skulls, many thousands of them, line the galleries of a former tuff quarry cut into the hillside of Materdei, at the western end of the Sanità valley in Naples.
Did you know? Donna Concetta, the 'sweating skull', stays glossy while others gather dust; devotees believed a damp hand after touching it meant a prayer would be granted.
24 Toledo
Italy · 0.5 km from Naples40.842° N 14.249° E
Zaiar95 · CC0 Riding the escalators down into Toledo station in Naples feels like sinking from the city into the sea.
Did you know? The underground station covers about 9,445 square metres, and its passages descend on a 5.5 percent gradient.
25 Piscina Mirabilis
Piscina mirabilis
Italy · 14.7 km from Naples40.795° N 14.080° E
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Did you know? It is often ranked as the second-largest known Roman cistern, surpassed only by the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.
26 Arco Naturale
Italy · 32.5 km from Naples40.549° N 14.256° E
Jerzy Strzelecki · CC BY-SA 3.0 On the wild eastern edge of Capri, where the cliffs fall away towards the Sorrento Peninsula, a great limestone vault stands free against the sky. The Arco Naturale is all that survives of a vast cavern that once opened deep inside the mountain.
Did you know? American painter William Stanley Haseltine painted the arch around 1870; the canvas is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
27 Farnese Hercules
Ercole Farnese
Italy · 1.4 km from Naples40.853° N 14.251° E
Rijksmuseum · CC0 The Farnese Hercules shows the strongest man of Greek myth at a moment of total exhaustion. Over life-size and heavily muscled, the hero leans wearily on his knotted club, over which he has thrown the skin of the Nemean lion.
28 Suburban Baths, Herculaneum
Terme Suburbane di Ercolano
Italy · 9.7 km from Naples40.805° N 14.347° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Mboesch · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Suburban Baths of Herculaneum are one of the best-preserved Roman bath buildings anywhere. They stand just outside the town, on the ancient shoreline, partly built over disused defensive walls, and are thought to have been a gift to the town from its great patron Marcus Nonius Balbus in the early first century AD.
Did you know? Eight skylights pierce the roof, and wide windows open all around the perimeter of the building.
29 Veiled Christ
Cristo velato
Italy · 1.3 km from Naples40.849° N 14.255° E
David Sivyer from United Kingdom · CC BY-SA 2.0 In the middle of a small chapel in the old centre of Naples lies a marble figure of the dead Christ, covered from head to foot by a shroud so fine that it seems to cling to the skin.
Did you know? Corradini's original terracotta model for the statue survives and is kept in the Museo Nazionale di San Martino in Naples.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Campania?
- On our list, Positano ranks first, followed by Royal Palace of Caserta and Faraglioni of Capri.
- When did Vesuvius destroy Pompeii?
- Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 and buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and nearby settlements under ash and pumice. Systematic excavation of Pompeii began in the eighteenth century under the Bourbon kings.
- Who designed the Royal Palace of Caserta?
- Luigi Vanvitelli designed it for Charles of Bourbon, King of Naples, and construction began in 1752. Vanvitelli also built the Caroline Aqueduct to feed its gardens and fountains.
- What are the temples of Paestum?
- Paestum, founded by Greek colonists as Poseidonia, preserves three Doric temples from the sixth and fifth centuries BC, among the best-preserved Greek temples anywhere. Two were later attributed to Hera, the third to Athena.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Campania?
- In our collection, the places in Campania are most often archaeological sites (5), rock formations (2), Carthusian monasteries (2) and catacombs (2).
- How many places are on this list in Campania?
- The list covers 29 places.