One day is not enough and never will be. It is still worth doing properly.
If you have a single day — a cruise stop, a layover, a train between two other cities — the worst plan is the greatest-hits list. You'd spend the day queueing. Here is one route, walkable, that gives you the real thing.
Start at Piazza Bellini, where the Greek city walls sit exposed in the middle of the square, and have a coffee standing at the bar like everyone else.
Walk into Via dei Tribunali, the main street of the Greek grid. Stop at San Paolo Maggiore — two columns of a Roman temple are built into its façade — and at San Gregorio Armeno, the street where nativity figures have been made by hand for centuries.
Then the Duomo, and the chapel where the blood of San Gennaro is kept.
The Sansevero Chapel. It's small, entry is capped, and it holds Giuseppe Sanmartino's Veiled Christ — a marble figure under a marble veil so thin that for two centuries people insisted it must be real fabric, chemically turned to stone. It isn't. It's carved from the same block, and that's the astonishing part.
Twenty minutes inside. Book it before you arrive.
Pizza, in the historic centre, at half past one. A margherita is often still under six euros. Or fried pizza eaten standing up — the dish born after the war when there were no working ovens.
One underground visit: Napoli Sotterranea or San Lorenzo Maggiore, where a Roman market street sits under a medieval church. Ninety minutes.
Then walk down to Piazza del Plebiscito and through the Galleria Umberto I.
Castel dell'Ovo, on its island, is free. Climb to the terraces and you have the whole bay: Vesuvius on one side, Posillipo on the other. Below, the tiny harbour of Borgo Marinari.
The light comes from the west and turns Vesuvius pink. It takes twenty minutes and it's the thing most people remember.
Pompeii. Vesuvius. The islands. The Amalfi Coast. The Archaeological Museum. Each needs half a day at least.
Trying to add one turns your day into a transport day. Accept the loss and see Naples instead — it's the part most visitors skip.
Walk. The whole route above is on foot except the last stretch, and walking is how this city is meant to be seen.
Don't hold your phone while you walk. It's the one precaution worth taking seriously here.
This guide is written and maintained in Naples. The Italian version of the site has far more: hundreds of places, neighbourhood guides and long-form stories about the city. Read it in Italian.
