Naples

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.

This is the single best piece of planning advice for the region. When the buried towns were excavated, the mosaics, bronzes, frescoes and household objects came here, to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale. Pompeii is walls and streets; the things that make it human are in this building. Go first, spend two hours with the Alexander mosaic and the Villa dei Papiri bronzes, then walk the site knowing what stood in the rooms. Visitors who do it in the other order almost always say they wish they had reversed it.

Pompeii is vast and mostly unshaded, and it rewards a plan: pick a handful of houses rather than attempting the whole grid, start early, and carry water. Herculaneum is smaller, deeper and far better preserved — upper floors, wooden fittings, carbonised furniture — and many people find it the more affecting of the two, with a fraction of the crowd. Vesuvius itself is a bus to a car park and a gravel path to the crater rim, an easy morning with a view over the whole bay. All three sit on the suburban railway that runs from Naples down the coast.

Ferries and hydrofoils leave from Molo Beverello and Mergellina for the islands. Capri is the famous one and is best given a full day or an overnight, since it empties in the late afternoon and becomes a different place. Ischia is bigger, greener and built around thermal water, with actual beaches and far fewer day-trippers. Procida is small, painted and quiet. The Amalfi Coast is reached by road via Sorrento — spectacular and slow — or by seasonal boat, which avoids the worst of the traffic and the switchbacks.

Naples invented the margherita and the local dough — soft, blistered, folded rather than sliced — is unlike pizza anywhere else. The famous pizzerias in the centre are genuinely good and queue accordingly; neighbourhood ones are often as good with no wait. Beyond pizza, eat fried: pizza fritta, crocchè, zeppole, sold from windows in the street. Sfogliatella, the shell-shaped ricotta pastry, is a morning thing, still warm. Coffee is drunk standing at the bar, quickly, and is stronger and cheaper than in the north.

Two layers below the centro storico repay a couple of hours. Napoli Sotterranea and the Bourbon Tunnel run tours through the Greek quarries, aqueduct channels and wartime shelters beneath the streets — cool, narrow, and a genuine change of register from the noise above. At street level, the newer metro stations are an art project in their own right: Toledo's mosaic light shaft is the one people photograph, and it costs a normal fare to walk through.

Walk the centre; it is compact, steep and hostile to cars. The metro and the funiculars up to the Vomero handle the hills, and the suburban line serves Pompeii, Herculaneum and Sorrento — slow, crowded and best avoided with large luggage at peak hours. On safety: Naples has a real petty-theft reputation and the sensible response is neither dismissal nor anxiety. Keep phones and bags close in crowds and on the suburban line, do not leave anything visible in a parked car, and behave as you would in any big southern-European city after dark.

April to early June and September to October are the best months — warm, workable for both ruins and coast, and outside the crowds. July and August are hot and busy, and a good part of the city shuts around the middle of August when locals leave. Winter is mild, quiet and fine for the museums and the centre, though the islands wind down. Give the city two full days on top of whatever you allocate to Pompeii and the coast; a single night is what turns Naples into the transit stop it does not deserve to be.