Explorer Portici

The Ipogeo dei Cristallini is a group of four Greek chamber tombs from the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC, about 12 metres below the Sanità district of Naples. Found in 1889 under the garden of the Palazzo Di Donato and opened to visitors in 2022, they keep carved and painted funeral couches, frescoed walls and a relief head of Medusa.

The National Archaeological Museum of Naples was founded in 1777 in the Palazzo degli Studi, the former seat of the university, and opened in 1816. It holds the Farnese collection of ancient sculpture, including the Farnese Bull, mosaics, frescoes and objects from Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae such as the Alexander Mosaic, an Egyptian collection and the Secret Cabinet.

The Catacombs of San Gaudioso lie beneath the Basilica of Santa Maria della Sanità and grew around the tomb of Gaudiosus, a North African bishop buried here in the 5th century. Early Christian frescoes and mosaics survive, and in the 17th century the Dominicans buried nobles here, setting their skulls into wall paintings of their bodies.

Castel Sant'Elmo is a star-shaped fortress on the Vomero hill above central Naples, built between 1537 and 1547 for the Spanish viceroy Pedro de Toledo on the site of an earlier Angevin castle. Its walls and terraces look out over the city and the bay, and the Museo del Novecento inside shows 20th-century art from Naples.

The Aquarium of Naples occupies the ground floor of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in the Villa Comunale and opened in January 1874, two years after the zoologist Anton Dohrn founded the research station. Its historic tanks, still fed with seawater through an underground channel, show the marine life of the Gulf of Naples beside newer tanks with a tropical reef.

The Museo di Capodimonte occupies the Palace of Capodimonte, begun in 1738 for King Charles of Bourbon on the hill north of the old town, partly to house the Farnese collection he inherited from his mother. Opened in its present form in 1957, it shows Neapolitan and Italian painting, decorative arts and the royal apartments, inside a large wooded park.

The Catacombs of San Gennaro are early Christian burial grounds dug into the tuff of the Capodimonte hill from the 2nd century, on two levels. They contain the tomb where the remains of Saint Januarius were placed in the 5th century, frescoes from the 2nd to the 10th century and the Basilica of San Gennaro extra moenia. Visits are guided.

Oplontis is a Roman site under modern Torre Annunziata, buried with Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Visitors enter Villa A, the so-called Villa of Poppaea, a seaside villa of the mid-1st century BC enlarged under the early emperors, with wall paintings, marble statues and gardens; Villa B nearby is not open. It is part of the Pompeii UNESCO site.

Pompeii is the Roman town buried under four to six metres of ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and excavated since the mid-18th century. Its archaeological park covers paved streets, the forum, temples, baths, theatres, the amphitheatre and painted houses, along with plaster casts of the victims.