Your essential food guide to Campania

• The must-make recipe from Campania
• What are the traditional ingredients in Campania?
• What are the famous dishes from Campania?
• The best cheeses to try from Campania
• The best wines to try from Campania
• The delicious. team’s top food experiences in Campania

Get to know the food of Campania

You’ll find incredible octopus, squid and clams served along the jaw-dropping coastline; further inland, there’s enough flat, fertile farmland to ensure meat and vegetables get a look-in too.

Many of the Italian dishes we know originated in Naples, which even as far back as the eighteenth century was a city famous for its food. Neapolitan cuisine is famed for being influenced by both the cucina povera (peasant cuisine) of the Campanian countryside, and the more aristocratic, extravagant dishes of the wealthy within the city. Pizza – Naples’ most famous culinary export – is the perfect example of this; originally a cheese-topped flatbread for the working classes of the city, it became a phenomenon among the wealthier citizens as soon as the pizza maker Raffaele Esposito put tomatoes and basil on it in honour of the visiting Queen Margherita.

In many ways, Campanian cuisine is what a lot of us think of when we think of Italian cuisine as a whole. Pizza and pasta reign supreme; ingredients like aubergine, tomatoes, lemon and anchovy are in abundance. While it doesn’t offer up the risottos, parmesan or meaty ragùs of the north, a large amount of the fresh, light, summery, Mediterranean flavours we love about Italian food can be traced back to this beautiful part of the country.

Our hero recipe from Campania

Pesce all’acqua pazza (fish cooked in ‘crazy water’) 

This simple (and wonderfully named!) dish from Campania shows you just how easy it is to cook fish. The bream simmers in a delicious tomato, garlic and chilli broth, gently steaming the fish until it’s cooked to perfection. A quick, easy and very affordable way to transport yourself to the Amalfi Coast.

Cook pesce all’acqua pazza (fish cooked in ‘crazy water’)

What are the traditional ingredients in Campania?

• Fish With picturesque coastal towns like Sorrento, Positano and Amalfi – plus the hugely important port of Naples – it’s no wonder that fish and seafood make up a huge part of the local diet. Campanian anchovies (specifically from Cetara) are always in high demand throughout Italy, but the local clams, squid, octopus and prawns are often so good they don’t make it out of the local area.
• Pasta Gragnano, a small town south of Naples, is where pasta first became an industry, rather than something you’d make from scratch at home. Pasta simply wouldn’t have the same worldwide appeal it does today without the factories that were first set up there. These same factories invented some of our favourite pasta shapes – cannelloni, macaroni, mafaldine and paccheri – and popularised other extruded shapes like spaghetti.
• Tomatoes Southern Italy certainly isn’t short of tomatoes, but those from Campania are particularly good. The San Marzano variety is from the region, famed for its fleshy, dense texture that makes it perfect for sauce, while the pomodoro vesuviano is grown in the volcanic soil of Mount Vesuvius, often strung up and dried in the sun for a seriously intense flavour.
• Lemons Amalfi lemons are big, knobbly things with a thick white pith, which might make them sound unappealing – but their zest contains more oils than the average lemon and they offer up a huge amount of sweet juice, making them arguably the best lemons in the world. Just down the road, in Sorrento, they have their own variety of lemon that’s used to make Campania’s famous limoncello liqueur.

What are the famous dishes from Campania?

• Pizza Let’s get the big one out of the way: Naples’ Neapolitan pizza is a worldwide smash hit. It needs no introduction and, while it sounds like a cliché, the pizzas in the city really do just hit different.
• Gnocchi alla sorrentina Potato gnocchi baked in a tomato sauce with heaps of molten mozzarella and plenty of basil to finish. A wonderful dish that really encapsulates Italian cooking; a handful of fantastic ingredients cooked simply. You’ll find the same combination of ingredients served with cannelloni and other pasta shapes too.
• Spaghetti alla vongole The clams caught off Campania’s coast are particularly sweet, which is why they need little more than olive oil, garlic and parsley to create a stunning pasta dish.
• Puttanesca Another world-famous dish from Naples, puttanesca is a tomato sauce for pasta flavoured with all the salty, umami superstars – anchovy fillets, capers and olives – plus a healthy helping of garlic and a mild kick of chilli.
• Acqua pazza Literally translating as ‘crazy water’, acqua pazza is a tomato and white wine broth used to poach whole fish. It originated with the fishermen of Naples, who would cook fish in seawater which would turn a light orange from the tomatoes.
• Insalata caprese The island of Capri has been a tourist hotspot for decades, and its famous salad – slices of mozzarella and tomato with basil leaves and olive oil – was supposedly invented to feed the wealthy visitors to the island.
• Sfogliatelle Sicily gets a lots of attention for its cannoli, but sfogliatelle is Naples’ own intricate sweet pastry. A laminated dough is filled with pastry cream and baked, resulting in countless layers of crisp pastry that fans out in a shell shape.

The best cheeses to try from Campania

Buffalo mozzarella is far and away Campania’s most famous cheese, made using the milk of water buffalo. Fresh, mild and milky, it’s at its best in a sandwich or on its own, drizzled with a little olive oil and sprinkled with pepper. When it comes to cooking, the cheese you actually want is fior di latte – another Campanian invention – which may look like mozzarella but melts so much better and has a more floral flavour. A pizza isn’t a true Neapolitan pizza without using fior di latte.

The best wines to try from Campania

Most Italian regions tend to excel in either white or red wine production – Campania is equally skilled at making both. The aglianico grape is favoured for reds, offering full-bodied tannins and dark fruit flavours; keep an eye out for aglianico del taburno and taurasi, which are generally regarded as the best wines made from the grape. Fiano and greco are the two prominent white wines, but because Campania has coastal, volcanic, valley and mountainous areas – plus a collection of grape varieties you can’t find anywhere else in the world – there is an awful lot more on offer.

Browse wine editor Susy Atkins’ pick of the nine best Italian wines to buy right now.

The delicious. team’s top food experiences in Campania

Tom Shingler, Head of food
“Sorrento, on the Amalfi Coast, is where I got engaged (after a terrifying clifftop hike on a route called Path of The Gods), so it’ll always have a special place in my heart. I had the best pizza of my life there, from a pizzeria in a car park (of all places!) called Antonino Esposito Pizza e Cucina. It was packed with anchovies and came with a little bottle of colatura di alici, a local condiment not too dissimilar to Asian fish sauce. The restaurant also served a pizza tasting menu, which I didn’t try but saw other people get through – they must have been very full by the end of it.”

Laura Rowe, Editorial director
“I hired a boat and circled the island of Ischia (where The Talented Mr Ripley was filmed) only to stumble on a newly opened restaurant that is only accessible by boat. You moor up and then climb up the side of the clifface, and we had wild rabbit ragù (a signature dish there apparently) that was one of the most memorable meals of my life.”

Thea Everett, Deputy digital editor
“I remember being shown around Naples by a local friend, who encouraged us to try a tonne of fried arancini and frittatine di pasta, including fried spaghetti balls with ham and cheese and ragù-filled arancini the size of my hand.”

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