Every June, eight wooden obelisks twenty-five metres tall dance on Nolan shoulders: the Festa dei Gigli, UNESCO-listed among Italy's great shoulder-borne machines, has thanked Saint Paulinus for fifteen centuries for the return of the town's prisoners. It is the beating heart of Nola, an ancient city where emperor Augustus died and where Giordano Bruno, philosopher of the infinite, was born in 1548.
The cathedral, the seminary with its ancient marbles and the Roman amphitheatre tell the rest; two kilometres away, the early-Christian basilicas of Cimitile are a one-of-a-kind site of origins-era faith. Naples is half an hour away, Vesuvius straight ahead.
Near Nola
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
