The survivor was taken by air ambulance to hospital.
Sixteen people who were in a second cable car, which stopped in mid-air near the foot of the mountain, were safely rescued.
They had to be evacuated one by one, with rescuers using harnesses.
“The cabin at the top has crashed,” Umberto De Gregorio, chairman of the EAV public transport company which runs the cable car service, wrote on Facebook, calling it “a tragedy”.
The accident happened as bad weather, including heavy rain and high winds, swept over many parts of Italy.
Mist and high winds hampered the rescue operation.
The cable car route, which lies nearly 50km south of Naples and the ancient Roman town of Pompeii, was opened in 1952.
Tourist hotspot
This is not the first time that tragedy has struck. In 1960, four people were killed when a cabin fell to the ground.
Castellammare di Stabia is located north of Sorrento, which commands views of the Bay of Naples and is a popular base for exploring the Amalfi Coast, Pompeii and the island of Capri.
This is the second serious cable car accident in Italy in four years.
In 2021, 14 people died when a cable car linking Lago Maggiore with a nearby mountain, in the north of the country, plunged to the ground. Among the dead were five Israelis.
The accident happened on a route that takes tourists from the resort town of Stresa up the nearby Mottarone mountain in the region of Piedmont.
The crash was caused by a snapped cable and a failure of the emergency brakes.
