By Ferry Between Napoli and Palermo

Overnight Ferries Napoli ⮂ Palermo

During a multi-week trip to Italy, I traveled by overnight ferry between Napoli and Palermo.

Ticket prices vary widely, like airline tickets and sleeper train tickets. The price depends on how far in advance you buy the ticket, the day of the week and the time of the year for your voyage, and the demand for tickets so far. Plan your trip early.

I bought my tickets during the last week of March, for travel south during the first week of May and back north during the first week of June. The first ticket, for a private cabin with no porthole, cost € 103.27, and the second, for a private cabin with a porthole, cost just € 89.27. The second included a cabin with a view and was a month later into the summer season, and so I would have expected the costs to be the other way around. However, the second trip had a much smaller load of vehicles, and fewer passengers, possibly because it ran the Sunday–Monday night leading into the national Republic Day holiday. Plan ahead.

Those struck me as good deals for transportation across 170 nautical miles of the Tyrrhenian Sea plus a night's lodging.

South from Napoli to Palermo

Mycenaean sailors established a settlement around today's Napoli in the second millennium BCE.

The population of Greece began to outgrow the country's agricultural output. The more prosperous and crowded Greek city-states began to establish colonies around the Mediterranean. One was established on the shore of today's Napoli harbor in the 8th century BCE. It was refounded in the sixth century BCE a short distance inland, around today's Centro Storico, named Νεάπολις or Neápolis, "New City", Rome seized control of the city and its harbor in 325 BCE, but Neápolis retained its Greek culture for centuries.

Aeronautical chart TPC F-2C showing Napoli, its harbor, and Mount Vesuvius, from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

Grandi Navi Veloci or GNV, based in Genoa, operates ferries between mainland Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, France, Spain, Albania, Morocco and Tunisia.

The passenger ferry area of Napoli's port is large. I had found the GNV offices and boarding area soon after arriving in Napoli, before continuing south to Salerno and Paestum. When I returned by train from Salerno to Napoli, I knew exactly where to go.

My southbound trip to Palermo would be on the MS GNV Antares, built in 1985–1986 in Yokohama. It entered service for North Seas Ferries in 1987, operating between the west coast of Britain and both Belgium and the Netherlands. It was taken out of service in the North Sea in late 2020 due to COVID-19, and sold to GNV. It's a large ferry — 31,598 gross tonnes, 179×25 meters, carrying up to 888 passengers and 850 vehicles.

Deck 7 was crew only, bridge above that. Deck 6 had lounge and bar with karaoke stage for when the alcohol took effect.

Aft of the lounge, between it and the open aft deck, was a block of cabins. Traversing its corridors, large group of 5th-8th grade kids, many standing in groups furiously texting and blocking the passageway while the rest sprinted and shouted.

A boy had found an unlocked crew-only storage locker and pulled out a large aerosol can of disinfectant. He was emptying it as fast as possible, filling the passageway with a thick fog and causing the others to scream louder.

Decks five and four were calmer, cabins and lounges and restaurants and spaces with rows of seats. My cabin was on 5. Two car decks below, trucks on deck 1.

North from Palermo to Napoli

Aeronautical chart TPC G-2B showing Palermo, from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

ORANGE
MS GNV Blu was built in 1986 for service on the Karlskrona-Gdynia route. Sold to SNAV, now operated by GNV, sometimes on the Bari-Durrës route. Hence the old SNAV Adriatica markings and the Albanian information placards in cabins. 31,910 gross tonnage, 164×28 meters, 1,320 passengers and 455 vehicles.

Where Next In Italy?
🚧 = under construction

In the late 1990s into the early 2000s I worked on a project to scan cuneiform tablets to archive and share 3-D data sets, providing enhanced visualization to assist reading them. I worked on the project with Gordon Young, who was Purdue University's only professor of archaeology. Gordon was really smart, he could read both Sumerian and Akkadian, and at least some of other ancient languages written in the cuneiform script. He told me to go to Italy, "The further south, the better."

Gordon was right. Yes, you will very likely arrive in Rome, but Italy has domestic flights and a fantastic train system that runs overnight sleepers all the way to Palermo and Siracusa, near the western and southern corners of Sicily.

So, these pages are grouped into a south-first order, as they should be.