Aquarium of Naples

Naples Aquarium tickets, with the Darwin-Dohrn Museum included

There’s one ticket for the aquarium and the Museo Darwin-Dohrn, the station’s museum, so you don’t pay twice. It costs €10 for both, comes on your phone, and asks you to arrive 10 minutes early. It can’t be cancelled or refunded, so buy it once your day is set.

On our ticket, children up to 4 go free, and there’s a reduced option at €7. The aquarium gives the reduced rate to older children up to 12, visitors over 70, university students with their card and people accompanying a disabled visitor. Bring ID if you’re on a reduced or a free ticket.

No Naples city card includes the aquarium, so there’s no card to weigh against this ticket.

Inside the Aquarium of Naples, from the rocky shore to the deep

The aquarium takes up the ground floor of the station, lit by daylight from the side windows and the skylights. That was the plan of its designer, William Alford Lloyd, an English engineer who had already built the aquariums of London and Hamburg.

The route follows the Mediterranean from the coast outwards: caves and crevices in the rock, meadows of posidonia seagrass, the reef-like coralligenous beds, the open water, with some exotic species, and finally a room for the deep sea. The big central tanks hold a tropical coral reef, there as a picture of how the Mediterranean is changing.

Look out for the octopus tank and for the moray eels. Their tank copies the moray ponds the Romans kept, remains of which survive in the underwater archaeological area of the Gaiola.

The Darwin-Dohrn Museum and its rebuilt laboratory

Your ticket takes you on to the Darwin-Dohrn Museum, the DaDoM, in the recently renovated Casina del Boschetto, 300 metres from San Pasquale station. It follows the relationship between Anton Dohrn, the station’s founder, and Charles Darwin, shows the station’s zoological collection, and has the laboratory of Salvatore Lo Bianco rebuilt, with the specimens he preserved.

Naples Aquarium opening hours and the rules at the tanks

The aquarium and the museum both open from Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00 to 17:00, and close on Mondays. Now and then the aquarium shuts for a day, as it did twice this year for planned power cuts, and the Fondazione Dohrn posts those closures on its website.

Inside, don’t tap on the glass, and leave the flash and video lights off. There’s no running, shouting, eating, drinking or smoking, and dogs stay outside, apart from guide and assistance dogs. Children are the adults’ responsibility.

Getting to the Naples Aquarium in the Villa Comunale

The aquarium is at Viale Dohrn 49, inside the Villa Comunale park, and metro line 6 gets you closest. At weekends, though, line 6 has been reported to stop in the early afternoon, so later on a Saturday or Sunday, line 2 is the safer bet.

Why a research station opened an aquarium in 1874

Anton Dohrn founded the Stazione Zoologica in March 1872, and Darwin wrote to him that year: “I fully believe that you have thus done a great service to science.” The philosopher Benedetto Croce later called the station “the great hotel of scientists”.

The aquarium opened two years later, in 1874, with three jobs: to let people see the sea, to teach them about it and to help pay for the research. The station became a national institute in 1982.