What to see in Naples in 3 days: day-by-day itinerary

Start your Naples education where the city's past is displayed rather than buried. The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli — MANN to everyone local — fills the vast Palazzo degli Studi on Piazza Museo, a monumental building that lived as a cavalry barracks and a university before the Bourbon kings turned it into one of Europe's great museums. It holds one of the finest collections of Roman art and everyday objects anywhere, and an enormous share of it was excavated from Pompeii and Herculaneum. That is precisely why it belongs on Day 1: tomorrow you walk the streets these objects came from, and everything you see here — mosaics, frescoes, cooking pots, election graffiti — becomes the key to reading the ruins. Do not try to see everything. Hit the colossal Farnese sculptures, the mosaic rooms and the Alexander Mosaic lifted from the House of the Faun, the finds from the Temple of Isis, and the Secret Cabinet, the once-scandalous room of Roman erotica kept locked for centuries. Two focused hours is the right shape for a group still shaking off a journey; the ground floor alone can swallow an afternoon. It is also your rain-proof anchor if April decides to open with a shower.

Cross the line into the Spanish Quarter and the street grid changes instantly. The Quartieri Spagnoli were laid out in the 16th century on the western side of Via Toledo — a tight orthogonal lattice of lanes built for the Spanish garrison and the city that served it — and the geometry survives intact: identical blocks, deep canyons of buildings, washing strung between them, scooters threading past kids playing football. For your love of street life, this is the hour that delivers it loudest, and you should wander it without a map. Every façade has something happening, from shrines tucked into wall niches to tiny bars spilling onto the pavement, and the neighbourhood has turned itself into an open-air gallery of tributes to Maradona, the city's football saint, where locals stop to photograph and argue about glory days. One honest note for the group: keep phones down and eyes up — these lanes are shared by pedestrians, scooters and delivery carts at once. When you finally cross Via Toledo, you step in seconds from a modern-era grid into the ancient city: the two Naples, back to back.

Spaccanapoli is neither a neighbourhood nor the official name of any single street. It is the popular name for the long, dead-straight axis that appears to slice the old town in two when you look down from a rooftop, and it follows the line laid down by the Greek and Roman street plan — the grid on which this city has been rebuilt again and again for some two thousand five hundred years. The route crosses the UNESCO-listed historic centre, past the baroque showpieces: the diamond-pointed volcanic stone façade of the church of Gesù Nuovo, the majolica-cloistered complex of Santa Chiara, the obelisk and quiet square of San Domenico Maggiore, and the marble statue of a reclining Nile god that locals call the Corpo di Napoli. For your taste for baroque churches, this is the city's greatest concentration of them, one after another with no ticket queue between. Early April light is a gift: sunset falls around 19:30, so you begin this walk in gold and finish under the lamps, exactly when the Neapolitans come out for the evening passeggiata. Buskers, wedding photographers, shouting grandmothers and students on scooters are all part of the performance.

You pass through the Sea Gate and within fifty metres the modern world dissolves. Pompeii was a prosperous Roman town of perhaps eleven thousand people living off the Sarno valley when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 — the Plinian eruption described in the letters of Pliny the Younger, who watched the pine-shaped cloud rise from across the bay. Pumice and ash fell for the better part of a day, then pyroclastic flows swept the town, sealing streets, houses, bakeries and bodies under several metres of debris. The site lay forgotten until Bourbon-era digging began in the 18th century, feeding the very museum you visited yesterday in Naples. Give the day a shape rather than trying to cover everything. From the Forum, with the Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of Apollo and the Basilica of justice, walk east along the Via dell'Abbondanza — the commercial spine of the town, with its stepping stones, wine bars and election graffiti — then branch north for the House of the Vettii and the Lupanare, and stop at the corner of Via Stabiana for the stuccoed ceilings of the Stabian Baths. The plaster casts of the victims, made by pouring plaster into the voids left in the ash by decomposed bodies, are the images that stop every conversation mid-sentence. Finish at the Amphitheatre and the Great Palaestra at the far eastern end, then leave by the Piazza Anfiteatro exit, about a 15-minute walk from the station. Sun management is the real skill of the day. April is kind compared with summer, but the site offers almost no shade, so hat, water and sunscreen matter, and spring wildflowers pushing up between the stones are your reward for coming now. Wear shoes with grip: the ancient basalt paving is uneven and slick after rain. And keep to one site: no Herculaneum today. Its wood, food and frescoes survive in a way Pompeii's cannot, and it deserves its own unhurried half-day rather than being crammed into this one.

The evening ends on Naples' spine. Via Toledo was driven through the city in the 1530s by the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo, and it has been the stage for the passeggiata ever since: a long, bright, straight promenade lined with shops, palazzi and churches, with the Quartieri Spagnoli grid pressed against its western side. At this hour it is at its best — families, couples, students and the occasional street tenor, all drifting south toward the sea. Walk it down to Piazza Trieste e Trento, where the Galleria Umberto I, a spectacular glass-and-iron arcade from the 1880s, glows across the street from the Teatro di San Carlo opera house. If you want a final coffee, the historic grand café on the piazza has been pouring them since the 19th century, and standing at the counter is the local way to do it. Push two minutes further and you reach Piazza del Plebiscito, with its sweeping colonnade and the vast neoclassical church of San Francesco di Paola — floodlit, half empty, and a fine last frame for the night.

Your last day goes downwards. Piazza San Gaetano, where you descend, is the precise centre of the ancient city — the Greek agora of Neapolis and later the Roman forum — and the neighbourhood above has been built, demolished and rebuilt so often that the older city survives beneath it in layers, like sediment. The descent drops around 40 metres into the yellow tufo, the volcanic stone that built Naples, through candle-lit cisterns and narrow corridors cut by the ancients as part of the city's water system, later sealed, reused and forgotten. Your guide explains how these aqueduct galleries and cisterns supplied the city, and how they were rediscovered under the modern streets. The second half of the tour is 20th-century: during the bombing of the Second World War these tunnels became an air-raid shelter, and you walk past wartime graffiti, abandoned objects, improvised rooms and the traces of the families who sheltered down here. There is a tight squeeze between rock walls at one point, which the guides shepherd you through, and the temperature stays cool and damp all year, so bring a light jacket even on a mild April morning.

The Rione Sanità only began to grow in the 17th century, when this untouched valley — already used for early Christian burial and long regarded as health-giving, even miraculous, for the purity of its air — was built over. The basilica of Santa Maria della Sanità rises at its heart, and its dome of yellow and green majolica is the neighbourhood's most recognisable silhouette, visible from half the city. Inside, find the oldest depiction of the Madonna in Naples, an image with a fierce local following, kept in one of the chapels. What strikes visitors most is the bond between the church and the people around it: the community here describes itself as born in the Sanità and working in the Sanità to change things for the better, and you feel that in the care taken over the building. Beneath the nave, the catacombs of San Gaudioso open into an early Christian cemetery named for Gaudiosus, a 5th-century North African bishop who died in Naples — the second great catacomb complex of the city after San Gennaro's — where frescoes, loculi and centuries of reuse tell the story of how Christians buried and remembered their dead here. Nor is the basilica short of legend. San Vincenzo Ferrer, San Bicienzo to locals, is loved with something closer to family feeling than devotion: Neapolitans say he listens to the tears of the city's mothers and reads the love letters of its daughters, and they still write to him and leave their notes in the church.

Now let the neighbourhood show off. The Sanità's streets are unusually wide and low for Naples — an echo of the constraints of building over ancient burial grounds — and the architecture is extravagant: baroque palazzi with flamboyant open staircases designed as double ramps, courtyards where children play football at terrifying speed, and ground-floor workshops still mending, baking and making. This is the Naples that community tourism has quietly transformed, with cooperatives running catacomb visits and social projects in the same lanes where film-makers have shot the neighbourhood's own stories. Follow the smell of frying and the sound of a radio into the side streets, greet the shopkeepers, and take your time: this is street life with no audience but the people who live here. If you have booked a slot (since its recent reopening, visits are by reservation only), the Fontanelle cemetery at the edge of the district is the strangest hour you can spend in Naples — a vast ossuary where tens of thousands of remains from the city's old cemeteries were gathered, and where locals once adopted anonymous skulls as anime pezzentelle, poor souls, giving them names and candles in exchange for favours. Without a booking, the walk itself is still the point.

However your journey home is booked, the exit from Naples is simple from here, and deliberately unhurried. Metro Line 1's Dante station is a two-minute walk from Port'Alba, and the line runs straight down to Garibaldi beside Napoli Centrale; from Piazza Garibaldi the airport shuttle coaches run out to Capodichino, and taxis wait at the station ranks. The ride itself is worth the fare — Line 1's stations were designed as artworks, and Toledo's deep blue mosaic hall is regularly named among the most beautiful metro stations in Europe. Two rules for the final hours. Build in a generous cushion, because traffic around Piazza Garibaldi can swallow half an hour without warning. And if you are catching a high-speed train, remember the layout you learned on arrival: mainline platforms on the upper level, the suburban platforms where your Pompeii adventure began down below. Leave the way you arrived — slowly, with a coffee, and already planning the return.