Naples

Description and climate

Generations of observers have described Naples as a vast popular theatre, a designation applying as much to the city’s aspect of a tiered arena as to its animated street life. It may also be characterized as an immense presepio, in evocation of the populous scene of the traditional Neapolitan Christmas crèche—the expansive natural setting being countered, within the town itself, by a congested vitality. In the shadow of Vesuvius, within the sweep of the bay, the Neapolitan decor is still predominantly one of moldering palaces in red or ochre and ancient churches in stone or stucco. Although the narrow old streets, teeming and traffic-ridden, clamber up hillsides topped by new constructions, few buildings in central Naples as yet rise more than 10 stories. Three fortified castles—two of them on the seafront and one on a central eminence—still define the city’s heart. At the picturesque, pale Castel dell’Ovo, the shoreline divides into two natural crescents.

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The blond, volcanic tuff, or tufa, of the region is much used in construction, as is the dark Vesuvian lava that paves the older streets. Magisterial use was also made, in past centuries, of the dark southern stone piperno, seen at its most imposing at the Castel Nuovo. The city’s aspect of southern colours interspersed with evergreen groves of ilex, palm, camellia, and umbrella pine reflects a climate in which balconies are in use most of the year. High temperatures in July and August often exceed 90° F (32° C), while the damp, chilly winter is alleviated by many brilliant days. Winter temperatures rarely fall to freezing, and the snow occasionally appearing on Vesuvius is seldom seen in the town itself. The south wind, the sand-laden sirocco, intermittently brings a burdensome humidity, terminating in rain.

Layout and architecture

Suburban Naples incorporates the headland of Posillipo, which joins the city at the yachting port of Mergellina—signaled by the church of Santa Maria del Parto. The nearby church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta, centre of a now-diminished popular festival, is steeply overlooked by a small park encompassing the entrance to the Roman grotto called the Crypta Neapolitana. This poignant place also contains the Roman columbarium known as the Tomb of Virgil, and the sepulchre of the Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi, who died at Naples in 1837.

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From Mergellina, the seaside sweep of Via Francesco Caracciolo is flanked by the long, public park called Villa Comunale, sheltering the Zoological Station and the Aquarium (the oldest in Europe), both founded in 1872. Along the inland border of the park runs the Riviera di Chiaia, marking what was once the shoreline. (The name Chiaia probably derives from ghiaia, denoting a shingle.) Still for the most part lined with handsome old palazzi, the Riviera di Chiaia was a favourite residential area for foreign visitors in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Neoclassical Villa Pignatelli, constructed for Sir Ferdinand Acton in the 1820s, is now, with its period furnishings, a museum. Recessed in contiguous streets, the churches of Santa Maria in Portico and the Ascensione a Chiaia contain works of the prolific 17th- and 18th-century Neapolitan painters.

Above this busy littoral, the panoramic Corso Vittorio Emanuele unfurls northeastward around the lower slopes of the town, toward the labyrinthine zone of Rione Mater Dei. Higher still, the prosperous Vomero district is served, like other upper areas of the city, by spiraling roads and a funicular railway. Among the modern blocks of the Vomero, the early 19th-century Villa Floridiana—housing the national museum Duca di Martina, with a fine collection of European and Oriental porcelain and ceramics—is easily distinguished in its extensive park.

Piazza della Vittoria—whose titular church commemorates the Battle of Lepanto (1571)—closes the sweep of Villa Comunale and leads inland to the fashionable shops of Piazza dei Martiri, Via Chiaia, and Via dei Mille. The waterfront road, becoming Via Partenope, passes along the ancient quarter of Santa Lucia—much altered since the late 19th century by land reclamation and monotonous construction and bordered on the seafront by some of the city’s best hotels. Beneath the spur of the Pizzofalcone quarter—the remaining fragment of the defunct volcano Echia and once the site of a villa of the Roman general Lucius Licinius Lucullus—a brief causeway leads to the seagirt Castel dell’Ovo, its ancient origins incorporated in a medieval fortress. On the bay’s second crescent, the eastbound road passes below the long, red flank of the Royal Palace and arrives at the foot of the mighty Castel Nuovo, which, with its round towers, dominates the main port on the one hand and, on the other, the large Piazza del Municipio.