Grotta del Mago
Barano d'Ischia (NA)
Hidden gemNature & hiking
The story
The fishermen who took shelter here during storms swore they saw an old man with a silver beard sitting on the rocks, surrounded by three dancing women. Also called Grotta del Tempio del Sole, it was even sought by the Nazis, convinced it hid a doorway to the underworld.
Access
Only by sea (boat or kayak from Ischia Ponte or Sant'Angelo)
More gems in Barano d'Ischia
- In the water & diving
Fonte di Nitrodi
Barano d'Ischia (NA)
Water that gushes warm among the rocks as it did two thousand years ago, when the Romans offered it to the nymphs: here the skin finds its calm.
- In the water & diving
Fonte delle Ninfe Nitrodi
Barano d'Ischia (NA)
A garden of springs where waters once dear to Apollo and the nymphs flow, among olive trees and open-air pools, far from the sound of the sea below.
- In the water & diving
Terme di Cavascura
Barano d'Ischia (NA)
In a gorge carved into the rock, pools and grottoes used since antiquity: you descend a canyon to plunge into scalding waters gushing from the mountain.
- Free beaches
Spiaggia dei Maronti
Barano d'Ischia (NA)
The island's longest beach, golden beneath walls of tufo (volcanic tuff), where in places the sand steams and the seawater warms itself.
- Hiking
Piano Liguori
Barano d'Ischia (NA)
The gentlest and most beautiful path on the island: you walk between rows of vines and cellars dug into the tufo (volcanic tuff), with the sea 300 metres below and Capri on the horizon. A few families still live here, and you can only get there on foot.
- Free beaches
Scarrupata di Barano
Barano d'Ischia (NA)
The name says it all: scarrupata, meaning collapsed. A wall of coloured clays fallen into the sea, and at the bottom a beach of big pebbles that its own inaccessibility saved from concrete. For the people of Ischia it is a place of the soul.
More gems: Nature & hiking
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via Foria
Founded in the Napoleonic age, the botanical garden on via Foria lines up glasshouses, palms and rare species across twelve hectares: a green breath a step away from the traffic.
- Nature & hiking
Pedamentina di San Martino
Vomero→centro
A fourteenth-century stairway dropping from the hill of San Martino down to the city: hundreds of steps through vegetable plots, gardens and glimpses of the bay — one of the finest urban paths in Naples.
- Nature & hiking
Vigna di San Martino
collina S. Martino
One of the largest urban vineyards in Europe, worked by the Carthusians since the fourteenth century: seven hectares of vines, citrus and olive trees hanging over the bay, a step from the city's chaos.
Nature & hikingVilla Comunale
Riviera di Chiaia
The garden stretched out along the sea at Chiaia: avenues of holm oaks, benches and old statues, with the gulf breathing beyond the iron railing.
- Nature & hiking
Acquario Anton Dohrn
Riviera di Chiaia
The oldest aquarium in Europe, opened in 1874 inside the Villa Comunale: historic tanks inhabited only by the fauna of the Gulf of Naples, behind the glass.
Nature & hikingSolfatara
Pozzuoli
The ground breathes: hissing fumaroles, mud that boils up and a smell of sulphur reminding you how alive the earth is beneath the Campi Flegrei.