Naples Reconsidered

A private guide to Italy's most misunderstood city — what it is, what it isn't, and why a small but growing number of our most experienced clients now ask for it specifically.

There is a point in the planning conversation with our most experienced Italian travellers — the clients who have done Florence, Rome, Venice, Lake Como, the Amalfi, and Sicily, often more than once — at which Naples enters the discussion. The conversation usually begins with hesitation. The client has heard things. The client has flown in and out of Naples airport on the way to Capri. The client has, perhaps, taken a day excursion from a hotel on the Amalfi to Pompeii. But the client has never spent a meaningful number of nights in Naples itself, and the suggestion that Naples might be the next Italian city to give them is, in most cases, an unexpected one. The piece that follows is an attempt to make the case.

The City the Clichés Have Missed

Naples is, by some considerable measure, the most misrepresented major city in Italy in the international imagination. The international imagination contains a Naples of pickpockets, of organised crime, of overcrowding, of urban dysfunction. There is, of course, a Naples that contains some of these things — every major southern Mediterranean city does — but the proportion of the city that contains them, and the proportion of any well-arranged visitor's time that intersects with them, is considerably smaller than the imagination suggests. The Naples that the well-arranged visitor experiences is, in our reading, the most genuinely cultured of any major Italian city after Florence and Rome, and arguably the most distinctively itself of any major European city of comparable scale.

It is also, importantly, in a period of considerable creative momentum. The opening of the Capodimonte Museum's new wings, the steady investment in the cleaning and restoration of the historic centre, the emergence of a generation of young chefs returning to the city after years in northern kitchens, the growing international recognition of the Neapolitan cuisine at its highest level — these are real changes, and they suggest a city that, like Lisbon ten years ago or Madrid twenty years ago, is in the act of being rediscovered.

What to See, And How

Naples is a walking city, and the major sites are concentrated in three overlapping districts: the Centro Storico around the Spaccanapoli, the Royal Quarter around the Piazza Plebiscito, and the Chiaia and Posillipo districts along the western seafront. We typically organise a four-day stay around mornings in each of these districts.

The major museum visits — the National Archaeological Museum with its incomparable collection of Pompeian and Herculaneum artefacts, the Capodimonte with its Caravaggios and Titians, the smaller but extraordinary Museo della Cappella Sansevero with the Veiled Christ — are best done in the morning with a private guide. We work with a small number of Neapolitan art historians whose knowledge of the local collections is exceptional. The Cappella Sansevero in particular benefits from a private guide; the Cristo Velato, Sammartino's eighteenth-century marble of the veiled body of Christ, is arguably the most extraordinary single sculpture made in Italy in the eighteenth century, and the visit is short, intense, and rewards the right preparation.

The Tables of Naples

Naples is, we believe, the most underrated major restaurant city in Europe. The pizza tradition — the Neapolitan pizza is, technically, a UNESCO-recognised intangible cultural heritage — is the city's most internationally famous food, and the major addresses (Sorbillo, Da Michele, Starita) have queues at lunchtime that are, in our considered view, generally not worth standing in. The serious pizza, in our practice, is taken at the smaller and less photographed addresses: Concettina ai Tre Santi in the Sanità, where the chef Ciro Oliva has reinvented the Neapolitan pizza with serious culinary ambition, or 50 Kalò in Mergellina, the more contemporary alternative.

The serious dining is at a different level. The two-Michelin-starred Caracol in Bacoli, half an hour from the centre on the Phlegraean coast, with its kitchen working in dialogue with the volcanic landscape, is among the most interesting kitchens in southern Italy. The starred Mammà on Capri, when we extend a Naples visit to include the island, remains a fixture. In the city itself, the more honest tables — Ristorante Mimì alla Ferrovia, where the Neapolitan fish cookery is at its most traditional, or the more contemporary Veritas — provide some of the most distinctive meals in the south.

The Hotels and the Coast

Naples' luxury hotel scene is thinner than the city deserves, but the available options are genuinely excellent. The Romeo Hotel on the harbour is the institutional answer at the highest end, with a Michelin-starred kitchen and a contemporary aesthetic. The Grand Hotel Vesuvio on the Lungomare, more traditional, is the choice for clients who want the classic Neapolitan grand-hotel experience with the view of the bay and Vesuvius. The newer Romeo Roma's sister property in Naples and the recent Britannique on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele are the more recent additions.

We sometimes propose, for clients who want to experience Naples without losing the coastal element, a split-stay arrangement: three nights in the city, three nights at a property on the Posillipo or Bacoli coast — the Capo La Gala in Vico Equense, perhaps, or the more recent Botania Hotel — with day excursions back into the centre.

This arrangement allows a more relaxed exploration of the city without compromising the access to the bay, the islands, and the volcanic coast that make this part of Italy what it is. For the experienced traveller, this is the version of Naples we increasingly recommend.

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