Pliny the Elder died here, watching too closely the eruption of 79 after Christ that also buried Stabiae: the villas of Arianna and San Marco, frescoed and panoramic, can be visited today almost alone. Before Vesuvius the town had already been razed once, in 90 before Christ, during the Social War, and it never fully recovered: when the eruption came it was a living but minor port, with its shops and its temple precinct.
Castellammare is a city of waters — twenty-eight different mineral springs at the spa — and of ships: in its yards, working since 1783, the Amerigo Vespucci was launched in 1931, the most beautiful training ship in the world. The cable car climbs in eight minutes to Monte Faito, a thousand metres above the gulf: the quickest balcony in Campania. Below, the seafront and the biscuit shops defend the ritual of the «biscotto di Castellammare».
Basilica santuario di Santa Maria di Pozzano · Chiesa di Gesù e Maria · Santuario del Sacro Cuore and 3 more
Pizza Napoletana · Caprese
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Next up: Saint Catellus, the 7th-century bishop who patronises Castellammare di Stabia, Tuesday 19 January
Nearest airport: Napoli Capodichino, 27 km away
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📅 Every year, on 19 January
Castellammare di Stabia celebrates Saint Catellus on 19 January; the 14th-century arch named after him, today one of the town's symbols, was in fact an entrance to the old cathedral, and his chapel in today's co-cathedral holds Roman-era archaeological finds.
Basilica santuario di Santa Maria di Pozzano Basilica and shrine on the hill of Pozzano, home of the Madonna venerated as the city's co-patron. Chiesa di Gesù e Maria Seventeenth-century Jesuit church in Castellammare, with Luca Giordano's Virgin of Succour. Santuario del Sacro Cuore Shrine at Scanzano, consecrated in 1908, holding the remains of Blessed Maria Maddalena Starace. Santuario di Santa Maria della Sanità Hill shrine at Quisisana born in 1717 around a fresco of the Madonna, reopened in 1991. Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
