Suggestions for a couple of hours in Naples

If it’s not a Tuesday, consider the National Archeology Museum. It has many of the finds from Pompeii. For lunch, you may want to have the famous wood-fired pizza.

We visited Naples via train from Sorrento one day, and Pompeii via rental car a separate day.

The highlight of our Naples day trip, the week between Christmas and New Years, was the Archaeological Museum, in a grand building on a grand boulevard. We took a taxi directly from the train station.

We also had dinner at the birthplace of pizza, Pizzeria de Michele, but had to wait 2 hours to get in. It was a pilgrimage so we waited for our number to be called, but took a walk around the neighborhood. It was littered with trash, and broken glass was all over the sidewalks. Even a remnant of a building from the Roman Empire, fenced off by a metal grate, was covered with litter. Saying it was a gritty part of everyday Naples would understate how dismal that part of the city was. The pizza was great, and having Neapolitan pizza elsewhere in town would save you time and the nastiness of that neighborhood. The taxi to the pizzeria took us down many streets lines with brightly lit shops - not what we were looking for, but not run-down, either. If you’ve got 2 hours, the museum is the best place to see as much of it as you can.

Pompeii was on New Year’s Day, and they closed early, at 1:00 pm. So that gave us just 3 hours there, and we didn’t nearly see everything. And it was hardly crowded that day. Interesting to see the remains of them actual buildings, and plaster casts of unfortunate victims who were buried alive by scalding and smothering volcanic ash, but the museum in Naples really shows off the goods.