Capodimonte Museum and Royal Woods

Capodimonte with the Campania Artecard or the Museum Card

Capodimonte is at the top of a walk that starts at the Archaeological Museum, and both cards below include the two museums, so one card covers the two big collections of Naples. On the Campania Artecard 365 Lite you get one entry here, and on the 365 Gold two.

How the two compare with the other Naples cards is on Naples Pass and Naples city passes.

Capodimonte Museum tickets: the guided tour, and a park that’s free

Card or not, the Real Bosco, the royal park around the palace, costs nothing to walk into; it’s the museum that needs a ticket. The one we sell is a guided tour for €38.50: two hours with an art historian in a small group, with a skip-the-line ticket, and you can cancel up to 24 hours before. Under-18s don’t pay at Capodimonte, and on the tour they have their own option at checkout.

The museum’s own audio guides are suspended, so the tour is the way to have the paintings explained. The museum lends wheelchairs, though the tour isn’t wheelchair accessible.

No booking is needed for individual visitors. Admission is free for all on the first Sunday of each month, 6 December being the next; nothing can be booked on those days, and cards give no priority.

Capodimonte opening hours, floor by floor, and the park’s

The floors start closing about half an hour before the museum does, and not every room keeps the same hours. On weekdays the Neapolitan galleries on the second floor shut at 17:00, while the Sala dei Capolavori on the same floor, with the Caravaggio, stays open until 19:30, so with little time, that’s the room to head for.

The lockers are free: you put in a €1 coin and get it back.

Caravaggio’s Flagellation and the masterpieces on the second floor

The Sala dei Capolavori, the room of masterpieces on the second floor, is where the Caravaggio hangs. He painted the Flagellation in Naples in 1607 for the church of San Domenico Maggiore, and it has been in the museum since 1972.

Around it hang Antea, the portrait the Mannerist painter Parmigianino made in 1535, Judith Beheading Holofernes by the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1612-13), the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci’s Hercules at the Crossroads (1596) and Andy Warhol’s Vesuvius (1985). The Cassetta Farnese, a casket of goldsmith’s work, is in the same room.

The rest of the floor holds the Farnese collection, which came from Parma in 1735, and a gallery of art made in Naples from the 13th to the 18th century. The museum lists Masaccio, Botticelli, Bellini, Mantegna, Titian, Raphael and Goya among its painters, along with Ribera and Luca Giordano, the leading painters of 17th-century Naples. Atlas Partenope, an exhibition by the artist Andrea Fogli, opened on this floor on 22 October 2026.

The royal apartment and the Porcelain Gallery

The first floor is the Bourbon palace itself, the Royal Apartment, with state rooms such as the Salone delle Feste and the “Pompeian” alcove of King Francis I.

Since 11 June 2026 the floor has also had the Porcelain Gallery, with 16 rooms and about 7,000 pieces. Its centrepiece is the porcelain room of Queen Maria Amalia, Charles of Bourbon’s wife, made in 1757-59 for the royal palace at Portici and moved here in 1866.

Some of the museum is closed for works: the third floor, with the 19th- and 20th-century art, part of the armoury, the De Ciccio collection and parts of the first and second floors, so not every painter on that list may be on view.

The Real Bosco di Capodimonte, free every day

The park covers 134 hectares and has more than 400 plant species, laid out from 1742 by the architect Ferdinando Sanfelice. From the Belvedere you look over the city and the bay, and elsewhere in the grounds are the Giardino dei Principi, a monumental camphor tree in the Giardino Torre and the old royal porcelain factory, which worked from 1743 to 1759.

There are cafés at the Stufa dei Fiori and the Giardino Torre. The church of San Gennaro in the park is closed. From November to January the park closes at 17:00, but the Porta Piccola, by the museum entrance, stays open until 21:00 and the Porta Grande until 20:00.

Getting up to Capodimonte from the Archaeological Museum

The museum suggests walking, on three routes of about 2 km and 30 minutes up from the centre. The one called I Due Musei, the two museums, starts at the Archaeological Museum and crosses the Ponte della Sanità, past the Catacombs of San Gennaro, before climbing the Scale del Niccolini steps.

The catacombs are about 15 minutes downhill from the museum, so they fit on the way back. The museum’s entrance is the Porta Piccola, at Via Lucio Amelio 2, which some maps give as Via Miano 2.

A short history of the Capodimonte palace

The palace was slow to finish: work began on 10 September 1738, and by 1758 only 12 of the 24 planned rooms were ready. In 1799 the French took more than 300 of its 1,783 paintings.

It went on to house three dynasties, the Bourbons, the Bonapartes with Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and the Savoys, and in the 18th and 19th centuries it was a stop on the Grand Tour, the long journey through Italy that young Europeans of means made to see its art.