Forio

This is the town were we lived in a wonderful hotel Corona, which we can only recommend. It is said to be the most visited place by tourists on the island. It has several beaches (we saw and tried all of them), nice centre, several churches and countless streets, which are worth walking. This town is also famous by wine production and amazing thermal park Poseidon gardens.The most famous church is Soccorso’s church devoted to Santa Naria delle Neve, which can be seen in the movie Avanti! (1972) filmed at this place. We saw it during the travelling to Ischia in the bus and it’s really nice light comedy. This church and its surroundings is considered as one of the most romantic places and you can see there a beautiful sunset. We took panorama picture from this point, which you can see above. There are really huge amount of churches and chapels and we saw only in one of them some restrictions about clothes.

There are four beaches in Forio. The Cava dell isola beach was the closest one from our hotel, around 5 minutes by narrow private path and in our opinion it was the best from the all. Whole beach was public ( there weren’t rows of beach lounge chairs and parasols, but you could rent it and bring it from near restaurant), there was the clearest sea and not too many people except the weekend, when it was hopelessly full. There was a restaurant at the entrance path to the beach with very good prices, food and nice sitting with the view of the sea so we were there several times.

The second beach was basically right next to the previous one but it was impossible to move directly between them because of the rocks. We walked the road there approximately 15 minutes from our hotel. It is bigger beach and there is popular and frequent visited thermal park Poseidon gardens above. There are many restaurants and each of them has its own part of beach with beach lounge chairs and parasols. One part of the beach was also set aside for Poseidon gardens. Therefore there were much more people and higher prices. In spite of it we spent very nice day there, we visited the thermal park and relished huge waves in the sea.

Chiaia and San Francesco beaches are in the opposite side of Forio. There are too many people and only few public parts of beaches. You can swim at the beginning of Chiaia in quite calm environment, but the sea is not very clean because of the near port. We recommend the far end part of San Francesco beach towards the way out from the town, where are maybe more rocks than sand, but there was really clear sea without yelling people and you can warm up yourself by lying on the warm rocks. It was worth walking to this place also because of seeing all the villas and hotels surrounded by green vegetation and beautiful flowers.