Naples International Airport

Naples International is the largest airport in southern Italy and one of Europe's most remarkable urban-airport configurations, handling roughly 12.5M passengers (2024) from a single 8,622 ft (2,628 m) runway and a footprint of just 230 ha (570 acres) — one of the highest passenger-per-hectare throughputs of any major European airport. NAP sits 6 km (4 mi) northeast of central Naples in the Capodichino district, close enough to the city that the terminal-to-Piazza Garibaldi run is among the shortest airport-to-downtown journeys in Europe. The airport has no hub carrier in the network-carrier sense; it operates as a high-volume leisure and low-cost base with Ryanair (its largest operator, running a major base with 20+ based aircraft-equivalents), easyJet, Wizz Air, Volotea, ITA Airways, British Airways, Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines, Aegean, Transavia, and a dense seasonal long-haul lineup including United (Newark) and Delta (New York-JFK and Atlanta during summer). The route network reaches 142 destinations across 70 airlines — unusual breadth for a single-runway airport and a reflection of the Naples-Amalfi-Pompeii-Capri tourism catchment. A single unified terminal opened in phased expansions through the 2010s handles roughly 12M design capacity; a second terminal (Terminal 2) historically handled low-cost operations but was consolidated into T1 and now hosts overflow seasonal charter. The severe operational constraint is the runway itself — 06/24 — with hills to the north and the dense Capodichino neighborhood to the south imposing steep noise-abatement gradients and restricting widebody operations. A second-airport project at Grazzanise, long proposed, remains unrealized, leaving NAP to serve the entire Campania region from an urban footprint smaller than many regional airports.