🇮🇹 Italy · Southern Italy (Campania)
Naples is one of the most intense and vibrant cities in Europe: chaotic, theatrical, noisy and at the same time loaded with art, history and overflowing humanity. Founded by the Greeks more than 2,500 years ago as Neapolis ('the new city'), it was the capital of kingdoms, the court of viceroys and one of the great cities of the Mediterranean. Today its old town — a Unesco World Heritage Site — is a maze of narrow alleys, hidden Baroque churches, blackened palaces, washing strung between balconies and street life that never stops. It is not a tidy postcard city: it is a living city, with character, and it gets under your skin.
Pizza as we know it was born here (the Margherita and the marinara), and the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo is on Unesco's Intangible Cultural Heritage list. But Naples is much more than its food: it is the National Archaeological Museum, where the mosaics and frescoes rescued from Pompeii and Herculaneum actually are; it is the Veiled Christ in the Sansevero Chapel, a sculpture that looks impossible; it is the underground city carved into the yellow tuff; and it is the balcony over the gulf with Vesuvius always in the background, reminding you who is in charge in this land.
This guide covers the essentials of Naples with a practical, honest eye: what to see in the centre and along the seafront, how to organise trips to Pompeii, Herculaneum and Vesuvius, how to get around on its museum-metro and the dreaded Circumvesuviana, and how to enjoy it without falling into traps. Naples asks for a bit of street sense, care with your belongings and a willingness to go with the flow; in return it gives you one of the most authentic and memorable experiences in all of Italy.
Naples grew out of two Greek cities: first Parthenope, on the hill of Pizzofalcone, founded by colonists from Cumae around the 8th-7th centuries BC, and then Neapolis ('the new city'), whose grid layout can still be made out in the historic centre. It was a Greek city, then a Roman one, and after the fall of the Empire it became an almost independent duchy in the Byzantine orbit. Then came the Normans (who absorbed it into their kingdom in 1139), the Hohenstaufen and, in 1266, the Angevins, who made it their capital. For centuries it was one of the largest cities in Europe: capital of the Kingdom of Naples and later of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under the Bourbons, a splendid court and at the same time a city of enormous inequality. It was struck by the terrible plague of 1656, which killed more than half its population. With Italian unification (1860-61) it lost its status as a capital and the long 'problem of the south' began. In the Second World War, its people staged the Four Days of Naples (27-30 September 1943), the popular uprising that drove out the Nazis before the Allies arrived. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The south of Magna Graecia and Vesuvius: Naples, capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; Pompeii, buried by the volcano; Amalfi, a maritime republic; Capri and a legendary coast, in the region marked by the southern question.
Read the history of Southern Italy (Campania) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Naples did not begin as one city but as two. Its origins go back to the great Greek expansion across the western Mediterranean in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Colonists from Euboea first founded Pithecusae, on the island of Ischia, one of the first Greek colonies in the West, and then Cumae, on the mainland. From Cumae, around the 7th century BC, a group of settlers founded a small settlement on the hill of Pizzofalcone, beside the sea, called Parthenope, by tradition in honour of the siren Parthenope, whose body legend placed on those shores.
In time, next to that first core — which came to be called Palaepolis, 'the old city' — a new city went up: Neapolis, which in Greek means exactly that, 'the new city'. From that name comes, more than two and a half thousand years later, today's Napoli. Neapolis was laid out on the typical Greek grid, straight streets crossing at right angles, with three great longitudinal axes (the decumani). The astonishing thing is that this plan is still alive: anyone walking today along Spaccanapoli or Via dei Tribunali is walking, literally, the same streets the Greeks laid out.
Neapolis was a prosperous, cultured city, deeply Hellenic in its language and customs. It kept that Greek identity even after entering Rome's orbit. In 326 BC, after a conflict, it allied with the Roman Republic as a federated city, keeping much of its autonomy, its Greek language and its character. In imperial times, 'Greek Neapolis' became an elegant, cultivated destination for the Roman aristocracy, who came to the Bay of Naples for its climate, its Hellenistic culture and the pleasure of leisure (otium). Virgil spent long periods in the area and was buried, by tradition, at the city gates.
Under the Roman Empire, Naples remained an important city in Campania, that privileged region where rich Romans had their villas and where Pompeii, Herculaneum, Baiae and Cumae flourished. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476 opened centuries of instability. The city first passed into Ostrogothic hands and then, during the Gothic Wars of the 6th century, was reconquered by the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire), which absorbed it into its Italian domains.
Out of that dependence on Constantinople came, around the 7th century, the Duchy of Naples: a territory governed by a duke who in theory answered to the Byzantine emperor but who, over the generations, became almost independent. While much of southern Italy fell to the Lombards, Naples managed to hold on as an autonomous, trading, seafaring enclave, proud of its Greco-Latin roots. It was an age of delicate balances: the duchy negotiated, allied and sometimes went to war with the Lombards of Benevento and Capua, with the other maritime duchies (Amalfi, Gaeta, Sorrento) and with the Arab fleets that raided the Tyrrhenian coasts.
For almost five centuries, the Duchy of Naples kept a remarkable independence, something exceptional in the fragmented Italy of the early Middle Ages. That long autonomy forged much of the Neapolitan character: a city used to defending itself alone, to trading with everyone and to mixing Greek, Latin, Byzantine and Mediterranean influences. All that would change with the arrival of a new power from northern Europe.
In the 11th century, warriors from far-off northern France changed the map of southern Italy: the Normans. Hired at first as mercenaries, they ended up conquering Sicily and the Mezzogiorno on their own account and uniting those territories into a single kingdom. In 1139, Naples, which had held out for centuries as an autonomous duchy, was absorbed into the Kingdom of Sicily founded by Roger II. Under the Normans first and the Swabian Hohenstaufen dynasty afterwards — among them the famous emperor Frederick II, who founded the University of Naples in 1224, one of the oldest in Europe — the city gained weight and institutions.
The great leap came in 1266, when Charles I of Anjou, brother of the king of France and backed by the papacy, defeated the Hohenstaufen and seized the kingdom. The Angevins took a momentous decision: to move the capital from Palermo to Naples. The city thus became the seat of a royal court, filled with new buildings — the imposing Castel Nuovo or Maschio Angioino, the Duomo — and grew into one of the largest cities in Europe. In 1282, the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers separated Sicily (which passed to the Crown of Aragon) from the peninsular south, which remained the Kingdom of Naples under the Angevins.
In 1442, after long wars, Alfonso V of Aragon conquered Naples and reunited both shores under his crown. The following centuries tied the city's fate to Spain's: for more than two centuries (from the 16th to the beginning of the 18th), Naples was governed by Spanish viceroys. It was an age of brutal contrasts: great artistic and architectural splendour — the Neapolitan Baroque, Caravaggio working in the city, dazzling churches — alongside extreme poverty, an overcrowded population and outbursts of popular revolt, such as Masaniello's in 1647 against taxation.
In the middle of the 17th century, when Naples was one of the most populous cities in Europe — with some 300,000 inhabitants under Spanish rule — catastrophe struck. In 1656 a devastating outbreak of plague broke out and within months ravaged the city and all of Campania. Historians' estimates speak of between 150,000 and 200,000 deaths in Naples alone: more than half its population disappeared in a single season. The city was traumatised, depopulated, and took generations to recover its vitality. It was one of the deadliest outbreaks of that second great plague pandemic that swept Europe for centuries.
The 18th century brought a change of course. In 1734, a young Bourbon prince, Charles — son of King Philip V of Spain — conquered Naples and Sicily and turned them into an independent kingdom, no longer governed by distant viceroys but by its own dynasty. So, in time, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was born, with Naples as its capital. Charles of Bourbon (later Charles III of Spain) drove a period of splendour: he had the gigantic Royal Palace of Caserta built, along with the San Carlo theatre (one of the oldest in Europe still in use), and he sponsored the first systematic excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, which fascinated all of Europe.
Through the 18th and early 19th centuries, Naples was one of the great cultural capitals of the continent, an obligatory stop on the Grand Tour of European aristocrats and artists. Its court, its music, its opera and the rediscovery of the cities buried by Vesuvius put it at the centre of the map. But beneath that shine the old wounds remained: enormous inequality, a poor countryside and a rigid social structure that Italian unification would not manage to resolve.
In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand entered Naples almost unopposed and brought the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to an end. The following year, the city and the whole south joined the new Kingdom of Italy, with its capital first in Turin and then in Rome. For Naples, which until then had been the capital of a state of its own and one of the largest cities in Europe, unification meant a loss of rank and political weight that left a lasting wound.
From that period dates what Italians call the 'southern question' or 'problem of the south' (the questione meridionale): the enormous economic, industrial and social gap between a north that was industrialising at speed and an agrarian south, poor and neglected. Naples, overcrowded and with districts of extreme congestion, suffered severe cholera epidemics at the end of the 19th century, which led to an ambitious urban sanitation plan (the Risanamento). Millions of people from southern Italy, many of them from Campania, emigrated between the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the Americas — including the Río de la Plata, the United States and Brazil — in one of the largest diasporas in European history.
That north-south imbalance, with its social consequences and also with the weight of organised crime (the Camorra), shaped Neapolitan history in the 20th century and is still a central issue in Italy. But Naples never lost its cultural force: it went on being a cradle of music (the classic Neapolitan song, with 'O sole mio' and so many others), of theatre, of cinema and of a proud, unmistakable identity.
The most heroic episode in the city's contemporary history took place in the middle of the Second World War. After Italy's armistice with the Allies in September 1943, German troops occupied Naples harshly: reprisals, deportations, looting and orders to destroy much of the city. But the Neapolitans did not wait for the Allies to liberate them. Between 27 and 30 September 1943, in what is known as the Four Days of Naples (Le quattro giornate di Napoli), the population — workers, young people, women, even the street kids, the scugnizzi — rose in a spontaneous popular insurrection and drove the Nazi occupiers out with barricades and improvised weapons.
When Allied troops entered Naples on 1 October 1943, the city had already liberated itself. It was the first major European city to rise successfully against Nazi occupation before the Allied armies arrived, a feat that earned Naples the Gold Medal for Military Valour and a place of honour in the memory of the Italian Resistance. The cost in lives was high, but the gesture became a symbol of the courage and dignity of its people.
The postwar years were extremely hard: Naples was devastated by the bombing and sunk in poverty, the black market and slow reconstruction. In the following decades it saw chaotic urban sprawl, shocks such as the 1980 Irpinia earthquake and the persistence of the south's economic backwardness. But it also had its revivals: the recovery of its heritage, a cultural reactivation, the creation of its famous 'art stations' on the metro, the listing of its historic centre as Unesco World Heritage in 1995 and of the art of the pizzaiuolo in 2017. Today Naples is a contradictory, magnetic city: poor and immensely rich at once, chaotic and deeply human, proud of almost three thousand years of history that still beats in every alley.