Southern Italy,
past the obvious.
The part of Italy most itineraries skip — the loudest city, the best pizza in the world, a coast road that turns the drive into the day, and the cities a volcano stopped in an afternoon.
Six days, two bases, and the south at its own pace.
The shape of it: two nights in Naples for the real city and the ruins it guards, then three in Sorrento as an easy base for the whole Amalfi Coast, Positano, and Capri — then home. You never need a car; the Circumvesuviana train and the coast ferries do all the work. This guide assumes peak July, so everything below is priced at its busiest — go in the shoulder and much of it drops.
Naples is loud, fast, layered, and completely alive — the antidote to a country most people only see through Rome and Florence. Drop your bags in the historic centre and just walk: Spaccanapoli cutting dead-straight through the old city, the Quartieri Spagnoli hung with laundry and scooters, the Galleria Umberto's glass vault.
Then the thing you came for — a proper Neapolitan margherita, wood-fired and folded, for the price of a coffee elsewhere. It is genuinely one of the best-value great meals in Europe.
Take the Campania Express out to Pompeii early, before the heat — a whole Roman city stopped mid-life, streets and shops and frescoes and the plaster casts of the people who didn't get out. A guide turns a beautiful ruin into a place you understand; going solo, give yourself three hours minimum and carry water, because there is almost no shade.
Back in Naples, go the other direction — down. The Napoli Sotterranea tunnels and cisterns under the old city are cool, strange, and a side of Naples most visitors miss.
The Circumvesuviana (or the smarter Campania Express) runs from Naples to Sorrento in about an hour — scruffy, cheap, and the sensible way to reach the coast without a car. Sorrento is the base most travellers default to, and for once the default is right: livable streets, an easy hop to Positano, Amalfi, Capri and Pompeii, and a cliff-top setting over the Bay of Naples.
Settle in, walk the cliff-side passeggiata at golden hour, and have your first long southern-Italian dinner — the gnocchi alla sorrentina is the local order.
The Amalfi Coast is designed to be arrived at by sea. You can ferry-hop it yourself — Sorrento to Positano to Amalfi and back — which is cheap and lovely and how the towns are meant to appear, rising out of the cliffs. Or give the whole day to a small-group boat tour: swimming stops in hidden coves, the coast from the angle the postcards use, and none of the SITA-bus motion sickness.
Either way, treat Positano as a place to arrive, photograph, and wander for a few hours — not a base. The vertical town is all staircases; the magic is the approach.
A fast ferry from Sorrento reaches Capri in twenty-odd minutes — close enough to do as a full day. Ride the funicular up to the Piazzetta, walk out to the Gardens of Augustus for the Faraglioni view, take the chairlift up Monte Solaro from Anacapri, and — if the sea is calm and the queue isn't brutal — the boats out to the Blue Grotto.
Capri is expensive and it knows it; go for the island and the water, not the designer windows. Back to Sorrento for a last dinner.
Take the morning slow — a last coffee over the bay, a walk down to the marina — then the train back to Naples for your flight out. Naples has connections almost everywhere, and it's the right place to end a trip through the south: the city where all of it started.
Six days, two bases, the real Italy — city, ruins, and coast — at a pace that let you actually be in each one.
What the south costs, honestly.
| What | Detail | Per person |
|---|---|---|
| Accommodation · 5 nights | Naples 2 (great value) · Sorrento 3 (the coast base) | €400–620 |
| Trains + ferries | Campania Express · coast ferries · Capri return | €70–120 |
| Activities | Pompeii · an Amalfi boat tour · Capri · Naples underground | €110–260 |
| Food & drink | ~€35–45/day · pizza in Naples, view dinners on the coast | €220–300 |
| Local transport & extras | Metros, buses, tickets, the Capri landing fee | €60–100 |
| Estimated total | 6 days · per person · before international flights | €1,000–1,400 |
New itineraries, first.
We publish these dated, honest itineraries as we build them. Join PONTUS and the next one lands in your inbox before it's anywhere else.
Get the next itinerary →