3 Best Sights in Naples, Italy

Originally named by the Greeks after the Mermaid Parthenope (who slew herself after being rejected by Odysseus, at least in the poet Virgil’s version), it's only fitting that Naples should have established one of Europe's first public aquariums in 1874. At the time—when, not so incidentally, the public imagination was being stirred by Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo and Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid—technological innovations came into place to funnel seawater directly from the bay into the aquarium tanks, which showcase fish and marine plants from the Bay of Naples, with a tank devoted to tropical fish. Officially named the Stazione Zoologica, founded by the German scientist Anton Dhorn, and housed in a Stile Liberty building designed by Adolf von Hildebrandt, the aquarium quickly became the wonder of Naples for children and art-exhausted adults. Reopened in 2021 after a six-year major overhaul, the foundation added the Museo Darwin-Dohrn (Da-DoM) a few steps away in the leafy Villa Comunale—the 19th-century naturalist and Dohrn were regular correspondents. The highlight is the skeleton of a sperm whale washed up in Ischia in 2018, in a room opening up to the bay.

The beautifully restored 17th-century Basilica di Pietrasanta, a Cosimo Fanzago Baroque masterpiece built on the site of the Roman Temple of Diana, hosts regular multimedia exhibitions, but the star attraction here is the underground visit to a section of Naples’s oldest aqueduct. Four tours a day descend 40 meters below the busy Via dei Tribunali to large lavishly illuminated cisterns hewed from excavated tuff two millennia ago, still filled with running water (thanks to a collaboration with the city’s waterworks).

Fascinating 90-minute tours of a portion of Naples's fabled underground city provide an initiation into the complex history of the city center. Efforts to dramatize the experience—amphoras lowered on ropes to draw water from cisterns, candles given to navigate narrow passages, objects shifted to reveal secret passages—combine with enthusiastic English-speaking guides to make this particularly exciting for older children. Be prepared on the underground tour to go up and down many steps and crouch in very narrow corridors.