The Most Beautiful Places in Naples
21 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Naples are Mount Vesuvius, Capri and Teatro di San Carlo. The list covers 21 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Naples lives between two volcanoes, Vesuvius to the east and the Phlegraean Fields to the west, and almost everything about it follows from that. Founded by Greek colonists as Neapolis, the city is built of and on yellow volcanic tuff, soft enough to quarry from beneath the streets, so a second Naples of cisterns, catacombs and ossuaries lies under the first. Above ground, centuries as a royal capital left churches and palaces of extraordinary richness.
Vesuvius sets the scene. Its eruption of AD 79 buried Pompeii, now the most complete Roman town anywhere, and Herculaneum, where the Suburban Baths still keep their stucco and marble under the volcanic deposits that sealed them. Along the bay at Bacoli, the Piscina Mirabilis is a vast vaulted Roman cistern built to supply the fleet at Misenum.
The underground is part of the city's character. The Catacombs of San Gennaro hold early Christian frescoes in galleries cut from the tuff, and the Fontanelle cemetery fills an old quarry with skulls once tended by local devotees. Above ground, the Cappella Sansevero keeps Giuseppe Sanmartino's Veiled Christ, a marble figure under a shroud so fine it seems to be cloth. The Certosa di San Martino looks over the whole bay from the Vomero hill, the iron-and-glass Galleria Umberto I opens under a high dome, and Toledo metro station sinks passengers into a shaft of deep blue mosaic.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mount Vesuvius | Volcano | |
| 2 | Capri | Island | |
| 3 | Teatro di San Carlo | Opera house | |
| 4 | Pompeii | Archaeological site | |
| 5 | Herculaneum | Ruins | ✓ |
| 6 | Blue Grotto, Capri | Cave | |
| 7 | Galleria Umberto I | Covered passageway | |
| 8 | Faraglioni of Capri | Rock formation | |
| 9 | Certosa di San Martino | Carthusian monastery | |
| 10 | Villa of the Mysteries | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 11 | Catacombs of San Gennaro | Catacombs | |
| 12 | Aragonese Castle | Castle | |
| 13 | Baia | Abandoned village | |
| 14 | Fontanelle cemetery | Catacombs | |
| 15 | Toledo | Railway station | |
| 16 | Piscina Mirabilis | Reservoir | |
| 17 | Arco Naturale | Natural arch | |
| 18 | Cappella Sansevero | Church building | |
| 19 | Farnese Hercules | Sculpture | |
| 20 | Suburban Baths, Herculaneum | Thermae | ✓ |
| 21 | Veiled Christ | Sculpture |
01 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.
02 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.
03 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.
04 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.
05 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.
06 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.
07 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.
08 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.
09 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.
10 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.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
14 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.
15 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.
16 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.
17 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.
18 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.
19 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.
20 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.
21 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 Naples?
- On our list, Mount Vesuvius ranks first, followed by Capri and Teatro di San Carlo.
- When did Vesuvius last erupt?
- Vesuvius last erupted in 1944, during the Second World War. It is still considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because of the large population living around it.
- Why is Herculaneum better preserved than Pompeii?
- Pompeii was buried mainly by falling ash and pumice, while Herculaneum was engulfed by deep pyroclastic flows that hardened into rock. This sealed the town so thoroughly that wood, food and even upper floors survived.
- Who carved the Veiled Christ?
- The Veiled Christ was carved by Giuseppe Sanmartino in 1753 for the Cappella Sansevero. The thin marble veil is so convincing that a legend claimed it was real cloth turned to stone by alchemy.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Naples?
- In our collection, the places in Naples are most often archaeological sites (4), rock formations (2), catacombs (2) and sculptures (2).
- How many places are on this list in Naples?
- The list covers 21 places.