Rome to Naples and Back: The Long Way Round

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The SR213 south of Terracina is the kind of road that makes you forget about the motorway entirely. It climbs out of small fishing villages, swings around cliff edges, and drops back to sea level between whitewashed towns strung along the shore like beads on a string. The Tyrrhenian Sea glitters to your right. Everything smells of salt and pine resin and something frying somewhere nearby.

This is the coast road between Rome and Naples. Not the fast option. Not the sensible one. But significantly better than anything you'll find on a motorway, and the kind of drive you'll still be talking about when you get home.

The trip takes a week. You head south along the Tyrrhenian shore, stopping at beach towns and Roman ruins and a couple of places that most people drive straight past. Then you loop back north through the Apennine foothills, past a bombed-out Benedictine abbey, a Bourbon royal palace the size of a small town, and a Roman emperor's summer retreat that was never meant to be seen by anyone but the emperor.

Two nights before you leave

Leave the car for last. Collect the rental on departure morning from a garage near Termini station, well outside the ZTL — Rome's restricted traffic zone, which covers most of the historic centre at most hours and sends fines to your home address weeks after you've forgotten about it.

Spend the first two days on foot. Rome is built for walking, not driving, and you'll cover more ground, eat better, and enjoy yourself considerably more without a car.

The big sights need no introduction, but they do need a plan. The Colosseum, Roman Forum, and Palatine Hill share a single ticket. Book online in advance and arrive at opening time. Budget at least half a day. Most people rush through the Forum and skip the Palatine Hill entirely, which is where you actually want to be: the crowds thin out, the views across the ruins are the best in the city, and you can sit quietly on stones that emperors walked across.

The Capitoline Museums, right above the Forum, are the oldest public museums in the world and hold Rome's finest collection of ancient sculpture, including the original bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.

For eating and neighbourhood atmosphere, go to Testaccio. It's a working-class district built around the city's old slaughterhouse and is now home to a market hall and some of the most unself-conscious Roman cooking you'll find anywhere. Carbonara, coda alla vaccinara, rigatoni with offal. The waiters don't slow down for tourists, and the menus are rarely in English. This is a good sign. Come for lunch.

Trastevere, across the Tiber, is for evenings. It has become well-known, and parts of it feel like it, but the neighbourhood is large, and the side streets behind the main piazza are still genuinely Roman, narrow, slightly dark, smelling of cooking and old stone. Walk in any direction from Santa Maria in Trastevere and see where you end up.

Ostia Antica—Where Rome met the sea

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Leave Rome before 9am. Thirty-five kilometres from the city centre, at the end of a straight road through flat suburban sprawl, the ruins of Ostia Antica appear without warning, an entire Roman city, almost intact, sitting quietly in a pine forest beside the motorway.

Ostia was Rome's harbour town, the place where grain ships from Egypt unloaded their cargo and merchants from across the Mediterranean did business. It was abandoned in the medieval period as the harbour silted up, and because nobody built over it, it survived. The mosaics in the merchant guild hall, each one depicting the trade of a different city, are among the best-preserved in the Roman world. The forum, the theatre, the bakeries, the public latrines: all still there, largely unrestored, largely uncrowded.

Allow two to three hours. Then pick up the coastal road south.

Anzio & Nettuno—The cost of a beach landing

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Anzio is a pleasant enough seaside town, a working harbour, a long promenade, restaurants that open onto the sea. But what makes it a stop worth making is its history. In January 1944, Allied forces landed on these beaches in an attempt to outflank the German defensive line and push toward Rome. The battle that followed lasted four months and cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides. The Museo dello Sbarco tells the story clearly and without drama, which is the right approach.

From Anzio, drive the few kilometres down the coast to Nettuno, where the American military cemetery sits on a headland above the sea. There are 7,862 graves here, arranged in perfect rows on a lawn of extraordinary neatness, each one a white marble cross or Star of David. It is very quiet. Almost no tourists come. That contrast between the beauty of the setting and what it represents is something you carry with you for the rest of the drive.

Heading south from Nettuno, the road runs along the edge of Circeo National Park, a strip of protected coastline with cliffs, forest, and the kind of beaches that Italians keep largely to themselves. The town of San Felice Circeo is worth stopping in for coffee and the view.

Sperlonga—Spend the night

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Sperlonga is built on a rocky headland above the sea, all white walls and narrow alleys and sudden views over water. From a distance it looks like someone stacked a Greek village on top of a cliff and forgot to tell anyone. From the inside, it's all steep staircases, geraniums in pots, and small restaurants where the chairs spill out onto any available flat surface.

Below the town, Emperor Tiberius had his seaside retreat, a series of grottoes and pools carved into the cliff, decorated with enormous sculptural groups depicting scenes from the Odyssey. The statues were smashed at some point in antiquity, reassembled from thousands of fragments, and are now displayed in the archaeological museum next to the ruined villa. They are extraordinary, dynamic, violent, technically brilliant, and almost nobody outside Italy knows they exist.

Spend the afternoon on the beach. Climb back up into the old town for sunset from the Torre Truglia. Stay the night. The day-trippers leave in the early evening, and the place becomes something else entirely: quieter, slower, more itself.

Gaeta—The peninsula that history kept coming back to

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Gaeta sits on a narrow peninsula that juts into the sea between two bays, with the old town piled up on the promontory and a long beach town stretching along the coast behind it.

It has been strategically important for most of its existence, a Roman resort, a Byzantine fortress, a medieval trading republic, a Bourbon stronghold. It was also the site of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies' last stand in 1861, when the last Bourbon king held out here for three months before surrendering to the new Italian state. Most of that history is still visible.

The Angevino-Aragonese castle sits above the old harbour. The Mausoleum of Lucius Munatius Plancus, a Roman consul who served under Julius Caesar and founded both Lyon and Basel, stands atop Monte Orlando, surrounded by a park with views over both bays. And on the far side of the promontory, reached by a path through the park, the Santuario della Montagna Spaccata is built into a split in the coastal cliff face, a medieval chapel wedged into a crack in the rock, with the sea visible through the gap below. It is one of the stranger things on this route and well worth the walk.

North of Naples, the road passes through the heartland of buffalo mozzarella production. The shops are obvious. Stop at one. Fresh buffalo mozzarella eaten within an hour of being made is not the same product as what you buy at home, and this is your best chance to understand the difference.

Naples—Two nights minimum

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Park on arrival and don't move the car again until you leave. Naples is a walking city, not because it's compact, but because the streets are so dense with things to look at, hear, and eat that covering ground at any speed faster than a stroll means missing most of it.

Spaccanapoli is the street that everyone tells you to walk, and they're right, but for more reasons than most guidebooks give. The name means "Naples splitter". It's a dead-straight line through the historic centre that follows the path of the original Greek main street from when the city was the colony of Neapolis, around 470 BC.

Walking it today means walking a road that has been continuously in use for almost 2,500 years, through a neighbourhood that has barely changed its layout in all that time. The street is dense with baroque churches, small workshops, street food stalls, and the kind of daily chaos that Naples conducts at a volume several notches above anywhere else in Italy.

 Via San Gregorio Armeno, cutting off to one side, is lined with artisan workshops that make nativity figures year-round. This old Neapolitan tradition has expanded to include politicians, footballers, and whoever is currently in the news.

Via dei Tribunali, running parallel a block to the north, is equally good and slightly less crowded. Here you'll find Pio Monte della Misericordia, a small baroque chapel housing Caravaggio's Seven Works of Mercy, painted in 1607, still hanging where it was always intended: above the altar. The painting compresses seven separate acts of charity into a single nocturnal scene of extraordinary complexity. It takes a while to untangle. Give it the time.

The Sansevero Chapel requires booking, and for good reason. The centrepiece is the Veiled Christ by Giuseppe Sanmartino, a life-sized marble figure of the dead Christ lying on a mattress, covered by a thin shroud. The shroud is marble, carved from the same block as the figure beneath it. It appears transparent. The fabric appears to cling and fold. How Sanmartino achieved this technically is still not entirely agreed upon. Stand in front of it for a few minutes and you'll understand why people make the trip to Naples specifically to see this one object.

Napoli Sotterranea, Naples Underground, is entered from Piazza San Gaetano on Via dei Tribunali. The tunnel system beneath the city dates back to the Greek period, when the city was built from tufa stone quarried beneath the city. The Romans expanded it into an aqueduct network. In WWII it became a bomb shelter. Tours run for about 80 minutes and take you through Greek cisterns, Roman passages, and wartime chambers where families sheltered during Allied bombing raids, leaving behind furniture, photographs, and children's drawings on the walls.

The Museo Archeologico Nazionale is the best classical archaeology museum in Italy and arguably in the world. It holds the contents of Pompeii and Herculaneum — everything that was removed from the sites before tourists, looters, and exposure could destroy it. The Alexander Mosaic, depicting the battle of Issus, is here. The Farnese Hercules is here. The collection of erotic art from Pompeii, kept in a locked room for most of its history and now open to all, is here. Allow a full morning and arrive when it opens.

Pompeii is best reached by the Circumvesuviana commuter train from Porta Nolana station rather than by car, parking near the site is chaotic, and the train takes about 35 minutes. The site covers 44 hectares and is one of the most overwhelming archaeological experiences in Europe: an entire Roman town frozen at the moment of the eruption in 79 AD, with frescoed walls, household objects still in position, and plaster casts of the bodies of those who didn't escape. Go early since the site gets very crowded from mid-morning, and in summer the heat inside the ruins is considerable.

Caserta—The palace Italy forgot to be embarrassed about

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The Royal Palace of Caserta was built from 1751 onwards for King Charles of Bourbon, who wanted a palace to rival Versailles. He got one. The building has 1,200 rooms, a staircase so large that a horse and carriage can ride up it, and a park stretching three kilometres into the hills behind, a long axis of fountains and waterfalls. It cascades that ends in a waterfall that looks, from the palace windows, like a thin white line on the horizon.

The park alone takes at least two hours to walk end to end, and the interior, the royal apartments, the grand theatre, the chapel, is worth another two. Build in a half day at minimum. Then pick up the A1 north toward Cassino and the hills.

Cassino & Montecassino Abbey—Where the war came to the mountains

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The Abbey of Montecassino stands above the town of Cassino, visible from the motorway as you approach from the south, a long pale building on a hilltop, looking impregnable. For a few months in 1944, it was the centrepiece of one of the most brutal battles of the Second World War.

The German defensive line ran through this part of central Italy, and the Allies needed to break through it to reach Rome. The abbey was bombed in February 1944, a controversial decision, since the Germans were not actually using the building, and then the battle ground on for months in the hills around it. The town of Cassino was almost completely destroyed. The abbey was reduced to rubble.

It was rebuilt afterwards exactly as it had been, stone by stone. Saint Benedict founded it in 529 AD and wrote his rule of monastic life here — the "ora et labora," pray and work, that became the foundation of western monasticism. The church and crypt that exist today are magnificent: marble, mosaic, and gold on a grand scale. The view from the terrace across the Liri valley and the surrounding mountains is extraordinary.

Before leaving the area, take the 30-minute detour west to San Pietro Infine. This small hill village was at the centre of the fighting in late 1943 and was so destroyed that after the war the Italian government decided not to rebuild it. It was left as it was. The ruined houses, the broken church, the collapsed walls are all still there, slowly being reclaimed by vegetation. A new village was built nearby for the inhabitants. The ruins are now a war memorial and one of the most affecting places on this entire route, all the more so because almost no one visits.

Tivoli—Hadrian's summer palace and the world's best garden

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Tivoli sits in the Sabine Hills about 30 kilometres east of Rome, and for most of its history it was where wealthy Romans went when the city got too hot, too crowded, or too political. The Emperor Hadrian built his country retreat here in the early second century AD, not a villa in the conventional sense, but an entire complex of palaces, theatres, libraries, temples, and artificial lakes spread across a hillside.

Villa Adriana covers more than 120 hectares. Centuries of stone-robbers stripped most of the marble and decoration, but the scale of what remains is still staggering.

Up the hill in the town of Tivoli itself, Villa d'Este was built in the 1560s for Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este, a man who was passed over for the papacy and consoled himself by creating the most extravagant garden in Italy. He largely succeeded. The terraced gardens drop steeply down the hillside in a series of levels connected by staircases, and every level has fountains, hundreds of them, powered entirely by gravity and the water of the Aniene river, filling the air with a constant roar of moving water.

Book tickets for both sites in advance. If you have the time and inclination, Tivoli makes a good final overnight before the short drive back to Rome, a quiet dinner, a slow morning, and 30 kilometres of easy road to close the loop.

The good to know

Total distance: Around 800 km — coastal route south, inland return north.

How long: 7 to 8 days. A workable split: Rome (2 nights) → Sperlonga (1 night) → Naples (2 nights) → Cassino (1 night) → Tivoli, optional (1 night) → Rome.

Car rental: Pick up and return in Rome. A compact or small SUV is the right size — the SR213 coast road is narrow in places, and anything larger becomes awkward. Book well in advance for summer travel.

When to go: May and June, or September and October. July and August are hot, crowded on the coast road, and genuinely unpleasant in Pompeii. Spring and early autumn give you better driving, better light, and restaurants that are cooking for their regulars rather than for passing tourists.

ZTL zones: Rome, Naples, Gaeta, and Tivoli all operate restricted traffic zones in their historic centres. The cameras are everywhere, the fines are automatic, and they arrive in the post weeks after you've left. Check access hours before entering any old town, and when in doubt, walk.

Tolls: The A1 autostrada is tolled. Budget around €20 to €30 for the inland return leg. The SR213 coast road is free, and the better road by some distance.