Villa Floridiana (Duca di Martina Museum)

Villa Floridiana: a free park, and a ticket for the museum

Two names are in use for the same place. Villa Floridiana is the house and the park around it, and the Duca di Martina Museum is the collection inside the house.

Anyone can walk into the park, every day and without a ticket. The museum costs €4, or €2 reduced, and under-18s go in free. You buy the ticket at a machine at the entrance, which takes only credit and debit cards, or in the Musei Italiani app and on its website. There’s nothing to book.

One card for the Floridiana and the rest of the Vomero

The Campania Artecard includes the museum on its 365 Lite and 365 Gold versions, and on the 7-day version it’s one of the five sites you can pick, with no booking. The card goes further on this hill, too: Castel Sant’Elmo and the Certosa di San Martino, also up on the Vomero, are on it. Of the cards we sell, the Artecard is the only one with the Floridiana; the rest are compared on Naples Pass and Naples city passes.

When the museum and the park are open

The museum closes on Tuesdays, and the park doesn’t. In winter, plan on 9:30 to 17:00, last entry 16:00, the hours it kept last winter; in summer it stays open until 18:30.

The park keeps its own hours, which change through the year, and from 1 November it closes at 16:30.

Inside the Duca di Martina Museum: three floors of ceramics

The man behind the collection was Placido de Sangro, Duke of Martina, born in Naples in 1829. After Italy was unified he went to live in Paris and bought from the great European collectors of his day, and in 1911 his heirs gave everything to the city. The museum opened in the villa in 1926.

Of its more than 6,000 pieces the core is ceramics, and the collection is spread over three floors. On the ground floor, Renaissance and Baroque majolica, Italian tin-glazed pottery, shares the rooms with paintings, ivories, enamels, corals, bronzes, glass and furniture. Upstairs is 18th-century European porcelain, from Meissen, Doccia, Naples and Capodimonte and from French, German and English makers.

Down in the basement is the art of the East: Chinese porcelain of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and Japanese Kakiemon and Imari ware.

The park, the Ionic temple and the duchess it was made for

Ferdinand of Bourbon, king of Naples, bought the property in 1817 for Lucia Migliaccio, Duchess of Floridia. He had married her in Sicily in 1814, in a morganatic marriage, the kind in which the wife doesn’t share her husband’s rank, and the villa took its name from her title.

The architect Antonio Niccolini rebuilt the house between 1817 and 1819 and laid out the park as an English garden, with a green theatre from 1821, an open-air stage of clipped greenery, a small Ionic temple, greenhouses and grottoes, and a view down over Chiaia and Mergellina. After the duchess died in 1826 her heirs altered the villa, and the state bought it in 1919. A colony of street cats, many of them black, has lived in the park since at least 1953.

Getting up to Villa Floridiana on the Vomero

The park has two gates, at Via Domenico Cimarosa 77 on the Vomero side and at Via Aniello Falcone 171. From the centre, the Chiaia funicular climbs to its Cimarosa stop and the Funicolare Centrale to Piazza Fuga, and metro line 1 stops at Vanvitelli. The Montesanto funicular is closed for its overhaul and expected back around February 2027.