Campania Luxury Itinerary: The Perfect 7-Day Guide

It is six in the morning and the light on the Bay of Naples is doing something that no photograph has ever quite managed to capture. The water is the colour of old pewter, the islands are barely there, and someone in the kitchen below is already making espresso. You are not yet fully awake, the air smells of lemon blossom and warm stone, and you think: yes, this is why people have been losing their heads over this particular corner of southern Italy for two thousand years. Campania does not ease you in gently. It simply presents itself – all of it, the chaos and the beauty and the food and the coastline – and waits for you to catch up.

This Campania luxury itinerary is designed for seven days, though you will almost certainly want more. It covers Naples and its singular energy, the ruins of Pompeii, the Amalfi Coast in all its vertiginous glory, the island of Capri, and the quieter pleasures of the Cilento. It is structured to move at the pace of someone who is genuinely on holiday, not someone completing a checklist. Reservations are noted where essential – and in Campania, more places require them than you might expect.

For the full picture before you arrive, our Campania Travel Guide covers everything from when to visit to what to drink.

Day One: Naples – Arrival and Immersion

Theme: The Beautiful Disorder

Morning: Arrive into Naples and resist every instinct to immediately leave for the coast. Naples rewards those who stay. Check into your accommodation, take a coffee standing at a bar in the Spanish Quarter – because that is how it is done here, and the Neapolitans will think better of you for it – and orient yourself slowly. The city is loud, layered, and entirely on its own terms. This is not a shortcoming.

Afternoon: Begin at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, which houses one of the finest collections of Graeco-Roman antiquities in the world. The Farnese collection alone would justify an afternoon, but save time for the Secret Cabinet – the room of explicit Roman erotica that was locked away for most of the 19th century. History, it turns out, has always been complicated. From there, walk the Spaccanapoli – the long straight street that cleaves the old city in two – and let yourself get pleasantly lost in the side streets. Pause at the cloisters of Santa Chiara, which are decorated with 18th-century majolica tiles in faded yellows and greens and have a particular, suspended quality that the busiest cities sometimes manage to preserve in their quietest corners.

Evening: Dinner in Naples means pizza, and it means this before it means anything else. Book ahead at one of the city’s historic pizzerias – the queues at the most famous ones are not mythologised, they are very real – and order the Margherita. The simplicity is the point. Follow dinner with a passeggiata through the Chiaia neighbourhood, where the city softens slightly and the aperitivo bars are doing excellent work.

Practical tip: Book dinner reservations at least a week in advance for the best-known pizzerias. If you arrive without a booking, you will be eating at nine-thirty and standing for most of it.

Day Two: Pompeii and Herculaneum – Where Time Stopped

Theme: The Weight of History

Morning: Leave Naples by eight o’clock at the latest. Pompeii in the early morning, before the tour groups arrive in their full, audio-guided battalions, is a genuinely moving experience. The site is vast – covering more than 44 hectares – and a private guided visit is worth every euro. A good guide transforms a walk through ruined streets into something close to time travel. You see the ruts worn into the stone by cart wheels, the thermopolium counters where Romans ate their lunch, the garden walls still faintly painted with the colours of the lost world. It is extraordinary in a way that no documentary has fully conveyed.

Afternoon: Many visitors skip Herculaneum in favour of spending more time at Pompeii. This is an error. Herculaneum is smaller and better preserved – the speed of the pyroclastic flow that destroyed it meant that wooden structures, fabrics and even food survived in ways that Pompeii’s slower burial did not allow. Spend two hours here and you will leave feeling as though you have seen something that the crowds at Pompeii missed entirely. Which is precisely true.

Evening: Return to Naples or head directly to your Amalfi Coast base. If staying in Naples, dinner in the Vomero neighbourhood offers a more residential, less touristy version of Neapolitan evening life. The locals here eat late and linger longer, which is a habit worth adopting.

Practical tip: Pre-book timed entry tickets for Pompeii – walk-up queues in high season can cost you an hour before you have seen a single cobblestone. Book a licensed private guide separately; the difference in experience is significant.

Day Three: The Amalfi Coast – Arrival and Elevation

Theme: The Road That Tests You

Morning: The drive along the SS163 – the Amalfi Coast road – is one of the great scenic drives in Europe, and also one of the most nerve-inducing. Hire a private driver. This is not a suggestion made lightly; it is the difference between arriving at your destination elated and arriving at it gripping the door handle with white knuckles while a coach reverses towards you on a hairpin bend. The coastal road threads between cliff and sea for roughly 50 kilometres, passing through Positano, Praiano, Amalfi and Ravello. Take it slowly. Stop when you want to stop.

Afternoon: Check into your villa or hotel in Positano or Ravello and give yourself the afternoon simply to arrive. Positano’s stacked, colourful houses descending to the sea have appeared in so many photographs that seeing them in person feels somehow both familiar and completely surreal. Swim off the main beach, or ask locally about the smaller coves accessible by boat. The sea on this coast is a specific shade of deep blue-green that you will spend the rest of the afternoon trying to name and failing.

Evening: Dinner at a terrace restaurant above the sea. The Amalfi Coast has a strong fish tradition – seek out the catch of the day, paired with local Fiano or Falanghina white wines from the Campanian interior. The wine list at restaurants in this region has improved considerably in the last decade, and it was already very good.

Day Four: Ravello and the Interior – The Quieter Coast

Theme: Above the Fray

Morning: Ravello sits 365 metres above the sea and has accordingly attracted artists, composers and writers who needed to think. Wagner composed part of Parsifal here. Gore Vidal lived here for decades. The Villa Cimbrone gardens are among the most dramatic in Italy – the Belvedere of Infinity, a terrace lined with classical busts overlooking the coast, is the kind of place that makes you want to stand in silence for a while. Go early, before the day-trippers from below arrive. The garden in the early morning light, with the mist still in the valleys, is worth getting up for.

Afternoon: Hire a boat from Amalfi harbour for a private coastal excursion. The coastline viewed from the water is a different proposition entirely – you see the sea caves, the abandoned watchtowers, the stretches of cliff that the road never reaches. Ask your operator to include the Grotta dello Smeraldo, a sea cave where the light filters through the water to create an effect that is not easily described to anyone who hasn’t seen it. A seafood lunch on board, somewhere off the coast between Amalfi and Conca dei Marini, is an extremely reasonable way to spend a Tuesday.

Evening: Back on shore, explore Amalfi town itself – the cathedral of Sant’Andrea is impressive in the particular way that southern Italian baroque tends to be, which is to say: thoroughly, almost aggressively so. Dinner in the town, later rather than earlier.

Day Five: Capri – The Island That Needs No Introduction, But Gets One Anyway

Theme: Glamour, Geology and the Art of the Well-Timed Escape

Morning: Take the early hydrofoil from Positano or Amalfi to Capri – early meaning before nine o’clock, which puts you on the island ahead of the main ferry arrivals. Capri is busy. This is known. The trick is to be there before the crowds, to have breakfast in the Piazzetta while it is still relatively calm, and then to move. The chairlift to Monte Solaro – the island’s highest point at 589 metres – is one of the quieter pleasures of Capri and rewards with a view that takes in the full arc of the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius, the Sorrento Peninsula and, on a clear day, the distant shapes of Ischia and Procida.

Afternoon: The Blue Grotto requires both timing and patience – the access window depends on tides and can close without warning – but if the sea allows it, the experience of floating into that electric-blue cave on a small rowing boat is one of those things that stays with you. Lunch at one of the cliff-top restaurants in Anacapri, the higher and quieter of the island’s two settlements, where the terrace tables and the slightly less theatrical atmosphere offer a useful counterpoint to the designer-bag theatre of the Piazzetta below.

Evening: Either stay on Capri for the evening – when the day-trippers leave, the island reasserts something of its older self – or return to the mainland by the late afternoon hydrofoil. Both are valid choices, and the decision often comes down to how much you want to pay for a Negroni with a view. (The answer on Capri is: rather a lot, and it is worth it once.)

Day Six: Paestum and the Cilento – The Road Less Driven

Theme: Ancient Greece, Buffalo Mozzarella and Blessed Quiet

Morning: Head south from the Amalfi Coast to Paestum, where three Greek temples from the 6th and 5th centuries BC stand on a flat coastal plain in a state of preservation that is almost implausible. The Temple of Neptune is particularly imposing – more complete than the Parthenon, built in Doric style, and often visited by nobody in particular when you arrive early enough. The on-site museum houses the celebrated Tomb of the Diver, a 5th-century BC fresco of a figure diving into water that has been interpreted as a metaphor for the passage into the afterlife. It is small, quiet and deeply affecting.

Afternoon: The flatlands around Paestum are buffalo country – the source of Italy’s finest mozzarella di bufala. A visit to one of the working dairy farms in the area, several of which welcome private visits, offers the opportunity to eat mozzarella within an hour of it being made. The difference between this and the product that arrives vacuum-sealed in London or New York is the difference between a live concert and a recording. After lunch, the Cilento National Park to the south offers hiking, unspoilt beaches and the kind of coastal scenery that the Amalfi Coast might have been if it had never been discovered. It essentially hasn’t. Go.

Evening: Stay the night in the Cilento – there are small hotels and agriturismo properties of considerable charm here, and the sense of having left the tourist circuit entirely is its own reward. Dinner will be local, simple and very good.

Day Seven: Return to Naples – A Final Reckoning

Theme: Endings and Pastries

Morning: Return to Naples at a leisurely pace, stopping if the road allows at the Reggia di Caserta on the way – the Royal Palace is one of the largest in the world and its gardens, modelled on Versailles but rather longer, include a series of cascades and fountains that run for three kilometres up a hillside. It is the work of a monarchy that was clearly not underestimating itself. Arrive in Naples by early afternoon.

Afternoon: Spend the afternoon in the parts of Naples you haven’t yet seen – the Certosa di San Martino on the Vomero hill, with its museum and panoramic terrace; the underground Bourbon Tunnel; or simply the street markets of the Quartieri Spagnoli, where daily life proceeds with an exuberance that is completely genuine and entirely exhausting to watch. Visit a pasticceria for sfogliatelle – the shell-shaped ricotta pastries that are as specific to Naples as the pizza – and eat them standing up, still warm, without ceremony.

Evening: A final dinner in Naples should be taken seriously. The city has a serious restaurant culture beyond the pizza temples – seek out a contemporary Neapolitan kitchen where the traditional ingredients of the region are treated with the respect they deserve and occasionally with something approaching ambition. Order the local wines. Order the seafood. Order dessert. You are leaving tomorrow and Campania will not let you forget it.

Practical tip: If flying from Naples Capodichino, allow more time than the map suggests. The airport is close to the city centre in distance and rather further in traffic.

Essential Planning Notes for Your Campania Luxury Itinerary

When to go: May, June and September are the ideal months – the light is extraordinary, the sea is warm enough to swim in from late May, and the worst of the high-season crowds on the Amalfi Coast have either not yet arrived or have gone home. July and August are genuinely busy; beautiful, but busy. The shoulder seasons have their pleasures too – the region in November, with empty temples and no queues for anything, has a melancholy loveliness that some travellers find more moving than the summer.

Getting around: Private drivers are essential for the Amalfi Coast road and strongly recommended for the first Naples arrival. Ferries and hydrofoils connect the coast towns and the islands efficiently and are a more pleasant way to travel than the road when the sea allows. The Circumvesuviana train connects Naples to Pompeii and Herculaneum cheaply and frequently, though it has a reputation for crowding that is entirely deserved.

Reservations: The most sought-after restaurants on the Amalfi Coast and in Naples require bookings made weeks in advance in high season. The same applies to the Villa Cimbrone gardens, the Blue Grotto (which also depends on conditions), and private boat charters. Building these into your planning before departure rather than on arrival will materially improve your holiday.

Pacing: This itinerary moves. If the point of your holiday is to slow down considerably, remove a day from the coast section and spend it in one place – a morning swim, a long lunch, a book, an afternoon nap. Campania is equally suited to both approaches. It simply requires you to decide which kind of traveller you are, which is information that seven days in southern Italy will also helpfully provide.

Base Yourself in a Luxury Villa in Campania

The difference between staying in a hotel and staying in a private villa in Campania is not merely a question of space, though space matters. It is the question of having a kitchen for the mozzarella you bought at the farm, a terrace on which to watch the morning light change over the bay, a pool that belongs only to you, and the freedom to be completely on your own terms in one of the most beautiful places in the world. A villa gives the region back to you in a way that a hotel, however excellent, cannot quite replicate.

Whether you want a clifftop property above Positano, a converted farmhouse in the hills above Ravello, or a coastal retreat on the Cilento shore, base yourself in a luxury villa in Campania and let the region unfold around you at exactly the pace you choose.