"Circumvesuviana" Top 5 Page for this destination Naples Transportation Tip by toonsarah

We made several day trips out of Naples and found it very easy to do this by train, so don’t think you need to rely on expensive sightseeing tours to get to the various places of interest. There’s a great little line called the Circumvesuviana that leaves from an off-shoot of the Centrale railway station. You can buy your tickets at a counter there, or in the main ticket office (where you need to go to the specially indicated counters – 7 & 8 when we were there). We tried both and found the former was quicker so I suggest you head straight to that area of the station.

Trains seemed to be pretty frequent (the longest we waited was about 20 minutes for one of our return journeys). The line goes through Ercolano (for the ruins at Herculaneum) about 20 minutes out of Naples, Pompeii after a further 15-20 minutes, and reaches Sorrento (the end of the line) in about 1 hour 15 minutes. The scenery, especially for the second half of the journey, is lovely – try to sit on the right going / left coming back if you want good views of the bay.

Tickets are really good value. We paid €1.70 for each single weekday journey (November 2007 prices) to Ercolano and Pompeii, and at the weekend were offered a €5 pass to cover multiple journeys, which took us all the way to Sorrento and back. It’s also very convenient – at Pompeii the station is almost opposite the main entrance to the ruins, although in Ercolano you’ll have about a 10 minute walk to them, and in Sorrento just a few minutes into the central square.

Mode: AROUND
Type: Train
Website: http://www.vesuviana.it/ (in Italian only)