Naples Travel Guide
A point of embarkation for emigrants in the past, Naples now has a large traffic of merchandise (petroleum, carbon, cereals) and passengers. In the vast urban area one can distinguish many different neighborhoods: the old center, characterized by buildings closely crowded together, is bordered on the west by the new administrative district and on the east by the business district, into which flows almost all the road and rail traffic. Other neighborhoods, with narrow climbing streets, rise around the base of the San Martino and Capodimonte hills. These neighborhoods have experienced intense development, typically of the simpler kind, in contrast to that of the residential neighborhoods that stretch out comfortably along the Vomero and Posillipo hills.
All Rights Reserved – Trey Ratcliff – From Stuck In Customs
Today Naples is a filthy, large, overbearing and crime-infested city – but in all these things lies the city’s charm. Although the living circumstances for most of Naples’ inhabitants are low, they know how to survive and to enjoy the joys of live.
Naples is a surprisingly large city, and a sprawling one, with a centre that has many different focuses. The area between Piazza Garibaldi and Via Toledo, roughly corresponding to the old Roman Neapolis (much of which is still unexcavated below the ground), makes up the old part of the city – the centro storico – the main streets still following the path of the old Roman roads. This is much the liveliest, most teeming part of town, an open-air kasbah of hawking, yelling humanity that makes up in energy what it lacks in grace. Buildings rise high on either side of the narrow, crowded streets, cobwebbed with washing; there’s little light, not even much sense of the rest of the city outside – certainly not of the proximity of the sea.
But the insularity of the centro storico is deceptive, and in reality there’s another, quite different side to Naples, one that’s much more like the sunwashed Bay of Naples murals you’ve seen in cheap restaurants back home. Via Toledo , the main street of the city, edges the old centre from the Palazzo Reale up to the Museo Nazionale Archeologico and the heights of Capodimonte ; to the left rises the Vómero , with its fancy housing and museums, and the smug neighbourhood of Chiaia , beyond which lies the long green boulevard of Riviera de Chiara , stretching around to the districts of Mergellina and Posillipo : all neighbourhoods that exert quite a different kind of pull – that of an airy waterfront city, with views, seafood eaten al fresco and peace and quiet.
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