Spiaggia delle Fumarole
Serrara Fontana (NA)
KnownNature & hiking
The story
Near Sant'Angelo the sand burns from the steam rising underground: here eggs are cooked beneath the grains and the swim becomes a thermal ritual.
More gems in Serrara Fontana
- Villages
Borgo di Sant'Angelo
Serrara Fontana
A car-free fishing village, its terraced houses stepping down to a sandy isthmus tied to the islet: a little square, boats, and the fumarole of the nearby Maronti beach.
- Hiking
Bosco della Falanga
Serrara Fontana (NA)
A chestnut wood full of houses carved inside the boulders: the farmers lived in the stone, and in a pit dug into the ground they stored the snow of the Epomeo to sell it in summer as ice. The wood is still there, the houses too, empty.
- Nature & hiking
Pietra dell'Acqua
Serrara Fontana (NA)
A huge block of green tufo (volcanic tuff) with a basin carved into its top, which collects rainwater. No one knows for certain who cut it or why: some speak of an altar, some of a watering trough, some say nothing at all.
Sacred artEremo di San Nicola all'Epomeo
Serrara Fontana (NA)
A hermitage carved entirely out of the tufo just below the summit of the Epomeo. Here, in the eighteenth century, Giuseppe d'Argouth, commander of the Castello Aragonese, withdrew: after a life of arms he became a monk and died here, in a cell of rock.
- Hiking
Sentiero dei Pizzi Bianchi
Serrara Fontana (NA)
A canyon of white tufo (volcanic tuff) pinnacles that look like melted candles, carved by water over thousands of years. The path drops down among them and ends, almost as a joke, facing the sea of the Maronti.
More gems: Nature & hiking
Nature & hikingOrto Botanico
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.