Naples Near Napoli Centrale Station

Naples’ main railway station, Napoli Centrale, opens onto Piazza Garibaldi, and three things worth the walk sit within fifteen minutes of its doors: the fish market inside the Aragonese gate at Porta Nolana, the tallest church tower in the city on Piazza del Mercato, and the carved marble arch of Porta Capuana, all of them south and east of the station rather than west along the tourist route into the old city.

No airport train from Napoli Centrale, just a shuttle bus

Worth knowing before you plan anything else: Naples International Airport has no rail link at all. The Alibus shuttle from Piazza Garibaldi is the whole of the public connection, 5 euros, every 15 to 30 minutes, timetabled at about 15 minutes and closer to 20 once it is in traffic. The stop is out on the square, partway between the station doors and Corso Garibaldi.

The square itself was rebuilt around the metro works and finished in 2016 to a design by Dominique Perrault, who put a folded steel canopy over the sunken entrance to the underground level and planted 130 trees across what is one of the largest squares in Europe. It reads less like a piazza than a lid over the transport underneath it, which is more or less what it is.

The fish market inside the Porta Nolana gate

Five minutes south, two squat round towers carry a stone arch across the end of Piazza Nolana. This is Porta Nolana, one of the surviving gates of the Aragonese city wall, and the street running through it is a market: crushed ice, whole swordfish, live clams in trays of seawater, alongside stalls of vegetables, cheese and household plastic.

It runs 08:00 to 14:00 Tuesday to Saturday and 09:00 to 13:00 on Sunday, shut on Mondays, and the fish end of it is loudest early. Come at half past one and you are watching a pack-up. This is a working market for the neighbourhood rather than a set piece for visitors, which is the reason to come and also the reason nobody will make room for you.

The Carmine bell tower over Piazza del Mercato

South of the station, the streets open into Piazza del Mercato, a long oval of a square with the church of Santa Maria del Carmine Maggiore at its far end. Giuseppe Nuvolo rebuilt the campanile in the seventeenth century and topped it with a tiled onion dome; at 75 metres it is the tallest church tower in Naples, and you can pick it out from most of the high ground in the city.

The square in front of it is where the city did its public business for six hundred years. Conradin, the last Hohenstaufen heir, was beheaded here in 1268 at sixteen. Masaniello, the fishmonger who started the 1647 revolt against Spanish rule, worked these streets, and the fighting ran through this square. On the night of 15 July the tower is wrapped in fireworks for the feast of the Madonna del Carmine, a staged burning that ends when the icon is carried out to put it out, and the church is free to walk into on every other day of the year.

Everything on this loop starts and finishes at the same place, and the concourse at Piazza Garibaldi and the airport-shuttle stop outside it both get tight with luggage at commuter times.

The white marble arch at Porta Capuana

North of the station, about ten minutes on foot, Ferdinand I of Aragon put up a gate in 1484 to a design by the Florentine Giuliano da Maiano, and it is still standing loose in the middle of its own square with the walls it belonged to long gone.

What makes it worth the ten minutes is the collision of materials. The arch is white marble, carved with trophies and flying Victories in the Florentine Renaissance manner, and it is jammed between two fat towers of near-black volcanic stone that were built for defence and look it. Behind it stands Castel Capuano, the Aragonese royal residence that became the city’s law courts in the 1540s and stayed a courthouse into this century.

Herculaneum, dug out from under the modern town

With four hours or more, the better use of the time is a train. The Circumvesuviana platforms are under the main concourse, reached by stairs from the hall in front of tracks 11 to 14, and Ercolano Scavi is under 20 minutes down the line for under three euros. From that station it is five minutes downhill to the entrance.

Herculaneum was buried by a pyroclastic surge rather than the falling pumice that hit Pompeii, which cooked and sealed the town instead of crushing it: upper floors still stand, wooden doors, beds and roof beams survived as carbonised wood, and you walk in past the arched boat sheds where three hundred skeletons were found in the 1980s. It is a fraction of Pompeii’s size, which is exactly why it fits a flight day. Entry is 16 euros, the park runs 08:30 to 19:30 with last entry at 18:00 from mid-March to mid-October and closes at 17:00 the rest of the year, and the ticket can be bought ahead on a tours and activities platform.

Collect the bag on the way through the station. If the wait turns out longer than you thought and the centre appeals more than a train, the main Naples layover guide heads the other way, fifteen minutes west into the ancient street grid and down into the aqueduct beneath it.