Italy

Naples

  • Population:3.0M
  • Timezone:CET (UTC+1)
  • IATA:NAP
  • Currency:The euro. Cards are widely accepted, but keep cash for street food, market stalls, small pizzerias and the coffee counter.
  • Key Areas:Centro Storico — the Greek grid, churches, street life · Chiaia — elegant, shops, seafront promenade · Vomero — the hill above, reached by funicular · Santa Lucia — Castel dell'Ovo and the bay front

Overview

Most visitors treat Naples as the doorway to Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast and give the city a night. That is backwards — the centre is one of Europe's great lived-in historic quarters, and the museum here holds the best of what Pompeii gave up.

Culture

Pizza here is soft, blistered and eaten folded rather than sliced, and the neighbourhood pizzerias are frequently as good as the famous ones without the queue. The rest of the city's eating is cheaper and less exported: fried pizza, crocchè and zeppole from street windows; sfogliatella warm from a bar in the morning; buffalo mozzarella from the Campanian plain; ragù that is a Sunday institution rather than a menu item. Coffee is taken standing at the counter, short and strong. Festivals: Festa di San Gennaro, in September, Christmas nativity workshops on Via San Gregorio Armeno, Maggio dei Monumenti, opening buildings in May. Museums: Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Museo di Capodimonte, Certosa e Museo di San Martino, Cappella Sansevero, Madre, contemporary art.

Practical Info

Safety: Naples has a genuine reputation for petty theft, and the useful response is neither to dismiss it nor to be frightened of the city. Keep phones and bags secured in crowds, on the suburban railway and around the stations; leave nothing visible in a parked car; and take the ordinary care you would in any large southern-European city late at night. Traffic is the other real hazard — scooters treat crossings loosely, so cross decisively and predictably. Language: Italian, with a strong local dialect you will hear constantly and are not expected to follow; English is common in hotels and around the main sights, patchier in neighbourhood bars and on the suburban line. Currency: The euro. Cards are widely accepted, but keep cash for street food, market stalls, small pizzerias and the coffee counter.

Travel

Naples is usually booked as a base rather than a destination, and that is the mistake worth correcting: the archaeological museum here holds the mosaics, bronzes and frescoes lifted from Pompeii and Herculaneum, so the city is not the doorway to the ruins but the other half of them, and seeing it first turns a hot day among roofless walls into something legible. The centro storico is UNESCO-listed and genuinely lived in — Spaccanapoli and Via dei Tribunali run dead straight through it on the old Greek street grid, hung with laundry, stacked with churches, and busy at a volume that surprises people who expected a museum quarter. Everything else radiates from there. The bay gives Capri, Ischia and Procida by ferry, and the Amalfi Coast by road or boat. Vesuvius is climbable in a morning, and Pompeii and the smaller, better-preserved Herculaneum sit on the same suburban line. Naples invented the pizza margherita and still makes the best version of it, but the eating that lingers is usually cheaper and less famous — fried street food, sfogliatella from a bar counter, coffee drunk standing at the till. Spring and autumn are the seasons; August is hot, and much of the city closes around the middle of the month. It is a loud, dense, steep city that rewards walking and defeats driving, and it repays two or three days rather than the single night most itineraries give it.

The historic centre follows the Greek street plan almost unaltered: two long straight decumani, Spaccanapoli and Via dei Tribunali, cutting east to west with narrow vichi between them. It is UNESCO-listed and completely lived in — balconies, laundry, scooters, shrines set into corners, and a church every hundred metres. Walk it slowly and step into things at random: the Cappella Sansevero for the Veiled Christ, a marble carving whose shroud reads as cloth from across the room; the Gesù Nuovo behind its spiked stone facade; the cloister of Santa Chiara with its painted majolica.

Frequently asked questions

Stay in Naples if you want the city, the museum, the food and easy rail access to Pompeii and Herculaneum; stay in Sorrento or on the Amalfi Coast if the coast itself is the point and the city is a stop. The common mistake is basing on the coast and giving Naples a single afternoon, which is not enough to see why it matters. A good compromise for a week is two or three nights in the city first — museum, centro storico, ruins — then moving to the coast for the rest, rather than commuting back and forth.

Diplomatic missions in Naples

2 embassies based in this city, grouped by region.

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