Mount Vesuvius

Mount Vesuvius tickets: a 10-minute slot, booked before you go

The park puts the slots on sale 30 days ahead, 50 tickets per slot, up to 2,160 a day from November to February.

Our crater ticket costs €21.60, for the slot you pick as you book, and it can’t be cancelled. At the start of the trail, an automatic turnstile lets you in from 120 minutes before your slot to 120 minutes after it, so the slot is a window rather than a deadline, though the window isn’t guaranteed close to the last access of the day.

The other tickets below add the ride up. The entry with a return trip from Ercolano on the Vesuvio Express costs €31, takes three hours, and can be cancelled up to 24 hours before your slot. From Naples, the entry comes with a return trip and a volcanologist guide, and it can’t be cancelled.

Vesuvius opening hours and the orange-alert closures

Vesuvius has no weekly closing day. The hours below are the times you can start up the crater trail.

The weather is the thing to watch. When the Civil Protection department puts out an orange alert, the park shuts the trail and stops selling, and in October 2026 that happened from 8 to 10 October and again for the whole of 21 October. On the morning of 25 October it closed for a cycling race. The park posts its closures among its notices, so look there and at the Civil Protection alert the day before you go, and again that morning.

Getting up Vesuvius from Naples, Ercolano or Pompeii

The road stops short of the trail. The car park is at 800 metres, and the crater trail starts at the square at 1,000 metres, called quota 1000, which has no parking and, for now, no public toilets.

Walking up to the crater of Vesuvius

The path to the crater, trail number 5 on the park’s map, starts at 1,000 metres and climbs to 1,175 over 4 kilometres there and back. The park rates it easy and gives it two and a half hours. It rises in wide bends, with Monte Somma, the rim of the older volcano, and the valleys below it, the Valle del Gigante and the Atrio del Cavallo, opening up beside you.

The whole trail is above 1,000 metres, so you walk in groups of 20 with the park’s volcano guides, the Presidio Permanente Vulcano Vesuvio. On the slopes you pass the lava of the 1944 eruption, the last one, now covered in a silvery lichen, Stereocaulon vesuvianum, and broom.

The crater is an ellipse 580 metres across at its widest, with fumaroles, vents of volcanic gas, on its walls. Viewpoints along the rim look down into it, and the Capannuccia, at 1,170 metres, a few metres below the high point, is where you turn back: the path round the north and east rim is closed to visitors. Looking away from the crater, you can see as far as Sorrento and Capri, and on clear days across the Campanian plain.

There’s a guides’ hut and a few concession stands along the trail. The ground is loose cinders and lapilli, the small volcanic stones that cover the cone.

Vesuvius with Pompeii or Herculaneum on the same day

A day with Vesuvius and one of the buried towns is tight in winter. Count three to four hours for the volcano and the same for Pompeii, whose last entry is at 15:30, so take an early slot and do the volcano first: its last access is at 15:00, and if an alert closes the mountain you still have the ruins. Herculaneum, at two to three hours, leaves more room.

From Pompeii, bus 808 or the return trip in our list takes you up and back. From Herculaneum, the shuttles leave from the same station, Ercolano Scavi, and a day from Naples with Herculaneum and Vesuvius costs €95. For all three in one purchase, the Vesuvius, Herculaneum and Pompeii pass costs €72.50: it holds a flexible Pompeii entry with an audio guide, the Vesuvius entry and Herculaneum.

No city card includes Vesuvius, not even the Campania Artecard. The Artecard does include Pompeii and Herculaneum, though, so it’s worth a look if the ruins are on your list, and the Naples Pass and Naples city passes page covers the rest.

The volcano behind Naples: Somma and the Gran Cono

What people call Vesuvius is two volcanoes in one. Monte Somma, the ridge beside the cone, is what remains of the old outer cone, and its top, Punta Nasone, reaches 1,132 metres. The Gran Cono, the cone you climb, grew inside its old crater, probably in the eruption of AD 79 that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. It has been quiet since 1944, but it isn’t extinct.