Travel Blog

A cruise call in Naples gives you a window of a few hours and a single real decision: stay in the city, or leave the bay for Capri, Procida, or the Amalfi Coast and come back before the ship sails. The first option is straightforward. The second is the one…

Almost everyone arrives in Procida with the same image in mind: a tight curve of fishermen's houses in ochre, rose and faded blue, boats pulled up on the stones, laundry above the water. That is Marina Corricella, and it is the reason most travelers put the island on the list…

Most itineraries in southern Italy are planned around destinations. Three nights in Naples, two on Capri, three on the Amalfi Coast, a day on Ischia if the calendar allows it. What almost never gets planned is the space between those stays: the morning you check out of one place, gather…

Ischia is the largest island in the Bay of Naples, and the one most American travelers leave for a second trip. It is greener than Capri, considerably bigger, and built around thermal water rather than around a single famous piazza. Getting there looks simple on a map. In practice, it…

Travel the water between Positano and the tip of the Sorrento Peninsula and you will start to notice them: squat stone towers set into the cliffs, some round, some square, standing where the rock meets the sea. Most visitors passing along the coast road never register them. From a boat,…

On a calm day in the Bay of Naples, the water off the little town of Baia looks like any other stretch of Mediterranean coast. Look a little closer, though, and shapes begin to surface a few feet below you: the line of a road, the threshold of a doorway,…

Between Positano and Capri, three small islands sit just off the coast, close enough to see from the beach at Positano and impossible to set foot on. They are older than Rome, tied to one of the oldest stories in Western literature, and for much of the twentieth century they…

It is the question almost every cruise traveler asks before the ship even docks: with only one day in Naples, is it really enough to see something worthwhile, or is the city better traded for somewhere else? The honest answer is that one day is enough, but only if you…