National Archaeological Museum of Naples

Naples Archaeological Museum tickets, with an audio guide or a guide

The ticket we sell costs €24 and comes with an audio guide app for Naples, which you download to your phone in English, French, Italian or German; it’s a guide to the city, not one made by the museum. The ticket covers the temporary exhibition and the open collections, apart from the Magna Graecia rooms, lets you in once, and can be cancelled before your visit date.

The Magna Graecia rooms open only in turns anyway, half a day at a time. Under-18s go in free, and on the ticket we sell they and EU citizens aged 18 to 25 have their own options at checkout.

With an archaeologist instead of an app, the guided tour in English costs €44. It lasts two hours, with a priority ticket, meets at the ticket office 20 minutes before the start, and takes in the Farnese Hercules and the Farnese Bull. You can cancel up to 24 hours before, but it isn’t suitable for wheelchairs. The fast-track ticket, at €34, adds a fast entry at a set time and a downloadable audio guide.

Entry is free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month, the next being 6 December. On those days nothing is sold in advance, and the Egyptian collection, the Magna Graecia rooms and the Gabinetto Segreto close.

The Naples Archaeological Museum on the Campania Artecard and other cards

Four cards we sell include the museum, and which one suits you depends on what else is on your list; Naples Pass and Naples city passes sets them side by side. Since under-18s go in free, only the adults need one, and on free days none of them gets you priority.

If Pompeii is on your list too, the museum ticket is €24 and Pompeii is €27.50, while the Campania Artecard 365 Lite includes both, plus Herculaneum and Caserta, for €31.

What’s open at the Naples Archaeological Museum until 30 November

Some rooms are being rearranged until the end of November, so check what’s open before you plan around a single piece. The museum lists the Farnese sculptures, the frescoes and the Villa of the Papyri bronzes as open every day.

On Thursdays and Sundays the museum publishes no timetable for the Magna Graecia and upper prehistory rooms, so don’t plan a day around them.

The mosaics section holds the House of the Faun’s finds from Pompeii, with the bronze Dancing Faun and the Alexander Mosaic, more than a million tiny stones showing Alexander the Great against Darius III of Persia. The Alexander Mosaic was taken off the wall in October 2023 and is being restored. The director has spoken of its return in the 2026–27 season, but there’s no date yet.

The Gabinetto Segreto, the secret cabinet, holds about 250 erotic objects, mainly from Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were kept apart from the rest of the collection and censored several times before opening for good in 2000. It’s closed for the same period.

Naples Archaeological Museum opening hours and the way in

The museum closes on Tuesdays and opens every other day from 9:00, with no separate winter timetable.

The MANNCaffè is open from 9:00 to 19:00, and you can eat in the café and the gardens, nowhere else.

The Farnese Bull, Hercules and the Atlas

The two giants of the Farnese collection, the Hercules and the Bull, are on the ground floor, among the sculptures the museum lists as open every day. Both were dug out of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome from 1545, for a collection that began with Pope Paul III, himself a Farnese, in 1534, grew under the cardinals Alessandro and Odoardo Farnese and reached Naples through Charles of Bourbon, king of Naples, who inherited it from his mother, Elisabeth Farnese.

The collection also has engraved gems, among them the Farnese Cup, a bowl of sardonyx agate, and portraits and series of philosophers and famous men. The third giant, the Farnese Atlas, carries the heavens on his shoulders upstairs in the Meridian Hall, on the second floor.

The hall belonged to the Royal Library. The Neapolitan painter Pietro Bardellino painted its ceiling in 1781, Piranesi, the engraver of the famous views of Rome, designed its candelabra, and the sundial line laid across it in 1791 still works.

The frescoes, the Villa of the Papyri and the Egyptian collection

The frescoes, taken from the walls of the Vesuvian towns, are among the rooms open every day. The finds from the Villa of the Papyri, a Roman villa at Herculaneum, fill a section of their own, open from 10:00 to 18:20. Athena Promachos, the goddess as a warrior, stands at the entrance, and inside is the largest group of Roman bronzes that has come down to us: the runners, the Resting Hermes and the Drunken Satyr. More than 1,800 charred papyrus scrolls came from the villa too, though they’re kept at the National Library of Naples.

The Egyptian collection, in rooms XVII to XXIII, is the second in Italy after Turin’s, gathered between 1817 and 1821. Look for the statue known as the Lady of Naples, the mummies and three mummified crocodiles sacred to the god Sobek. The Temple of Isis section, in rooms 79 to 82, belongs with the Egyptians, and the model of Pompeii, made of cork in 1879 at a scale of 1:100, shows you the whole town before you see the ruins.

The Magna Graecia rooms, when they’re open, hold thousands of vases and terracottas from the Greek cities of southern Italy, with the Darius Vase from Canosa, the painted slabs of the Tomb of the Dancers from Ruvo and gold from Cumae and Taranto. You need flat shoes with no heels in those rooms, and the museum hands out overshoes.

From cavalry stables to Naples’s archaeological museum

The building went up at the end of the 16th century as cavalry stables, and from 1616 to 1777 it housed the university. Ferdinand IV, king of Naples, then brought the Farnese collection here, together with the finds from Herculaneum, dug since 1738, and Pompeii, dug since 1748, that until then had been shown in a museum at Portici.

It became the Royal Bourbon Museum in 1816 and the National Museum in 1860. The paintings left for Capodimonte in 1957, and that’s when it became the archaeological museum you visit today.

Getting to the Naples Archaeological Museum by metro

Metro line 1 has a station named after the museum, Museo, and it comes up right beside it. Line 1 gets you there from both the central station and the port, and from the station line 2 works too: get off at Cavour, a short walk away.

Flying in, take the Alibus to the central station and change to the metro, or a taxi at the fixed fare of €24. From the port there’s also bus R1, from Via Medina to Piazza Museo, and buses 139, 168, C63 and 178 stop nearby. Drivers will find blue-zone parking in the streets around.