Hostel Of The Sun: Award-Winning Hostel In The Heart Of Naples, Italy

Pompeii

Opening Times: April-October: daily 8.30 am – 7.30 pm
November-March daily 8.30 am – 5 pm
Last entry one hour before closing time.

Price: Entry costs 11 euros (5.50 euros for EU students, under 18 or above 65 free)
Required time: at least 3 or 4 hours.

Pompeii is one of Italy’s most visited tourist attractions. It stands at the foot of Mount Vesuvius that, with its eruption on the 24th of August 79 AD, destroyed the city of Pompeii by completely covering it in stones and ash. Pompeii lay undiscovered until in 1748 when excavations began on the site, revealing a city frozen in time. A

Population: 5,000

Amalfi is a beautiful town located on the spectacular Amalfi coast around 40 km southeast of Naples. As with the majority of towns along the coast, Amalfi attracts mostly day-trippers and as a result does not have a huge amount of hotels. Those, which it does have, will be very difficult to get a place in the summer months. It is advisable to stay in Naples and head over to the coastal town for the day.

Population: 16,500

Sorrento is a cliff-side town that overlooks the Bay of Naples. The town is famous for its steep slopes, beautiful views of Naples and Vesuvius and most of all Limoncello.

Facts:
Size: about 10 km by 7 km, the largest of the islands in the Bay of Naples, with an area of 47 m² and 37 km of coastline
Population: around 60,000
Location: around 30km from Naples

Although not to the extent of it’s neighbour, Capri, Ischia, the largest of the islands off the coast of Naples, attracts a large number of German and English tourists. Ischia has fantastic beaches, a few very pretty towns, and a number of thermal spa resorts. Despite not being as famous as it’s neighbour, it is considered by most to be the more beautiful of the two. Ischia is also used as the location of some of the scenes in the film The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Capri

Capri

Facts:
Inhabitants: around 7,000. The island has up to 5,000 visitors a day over the summer months.
Size: 6 km x 2.7 km
Pronounced Capri NOT Capri, this island is a single block of limestone in the Bay of Naples that remains relatively unspoilt, despite the masses of tourists that flock there over the summer months. At it’s closest point, it is around 5 km from the mainland.

Nowhere in the world can you have a deeper insight into how Roman life would have been than in Pompeii and Herculaneum. While Pompeii was covered in volcanic ash when Vesuvis ernupted in AD 79, Herculaneum, already partly destroyed by an earthquake in AD 63, being much closer to the volcano was completely submerged in mud, essentially fossilising the whole town. This fossilisation allowed the preservation of many more objects, however delicate. Although smaller than Pompeii, it is though that Herculaneum was a much wealthier town.

What’s the main reason people enjoy visiting here?

Mt Vesuivius is one of the most active volcanoes in europe, and it’s the only one that’s still active and located on the european mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years, it’s most recently occuring in 1944. The Volcano is famous all over the world for his eruption in 79 DC that lcaused the destruction of Pompeii and Hercolaneum, now considered to be the best preserved Roman cities in the world.