Naples

To the left of the archeological museum as you come out, Piazza Cavour is a busy traffic junction and bus stop. A short achievement east, at 223 Via Foria, lies the Orto Botanico (Mon-Fri 9am-2pm, by appointment only; tel 081.449.759), founded in 1807 by Joseph Bonaparte and a detour worth making if you’re interested in such things. Perhaps more intriguing is the enormously long facade, actually only one fifth of the originally conceived size, of the Albergo dei Poveri alongside, a workhouse built in 1751 that has been empty for years and forms a vast, oddly derelict landmark along the top side of Piazza Carlo III . North of Piazza Cavour, you can stroll up through the old quarter of SANITÀ , following the tangle of streets for ten minutes or so up to the church of Santa Maria della Sanità on the piazza of the same name, a Dominican church from the primeval seventeenth century whose design was based loosely on Bramante’s for Saint Peter’s in Rome. There are paintings by Giordano and other Neapolitan artists inside, if you can get in, although perhaps of more interest are the Catacombe di San Gaudioso (guided tours in the mornings, afternoons by appointment only tel 081.544.1305; L5000/¬2.58) underneath, an intriguing early-Christian burial ground full of skeletons and the fifth-century tomb of St Gaudioso, who was known, apparently, as the “African”, due to the fact that he was a fifth-century bishop from North Africa.

Lifts link Sanità with Corso Amedeo up above, the main road up to Capodimonte. Walk under the bridge through to the rest of the teeming district, home to a couple of the city centre’s larger hospitals and, close by one of them, another burial place, the Catacombe di San Gennaro (daily tours at 9.30am, 10.15am, 11am & 11.45am; L5000/¬2.58), behind the huge Madre del Buon Consiglio church. These were discovered only recently, next to the originally eighth-century church of San Gennaro in Moenia, and hold primeval Christian frescoes and mosaics, newly restored and amazingly bright. Continuing the death theme is the Cimitero della Fontanelle (open last Sat of the month; free), prefabricated up of caverns containing the bones and skulls of - so it’s said - plague victims, some of which have been “adopted” by visitors over the years in a weird kind of ex-voto cult. The cemetery is a good ten-minute achievement from the bridge over Corso Amedeo, following Via della Sanità at first, then Via Fontanelle to its end; or bus #105 goes right there from Via Duomo.

At the top of the hill, accessible by bus #110 from Piazza Garibaldi or #24 from Piazza Dante, the Palazzo Reale di Capodimonte - and its beautiful park (9am-1hr before dusk; free) - was the royal residence of the Bourbon King Charles III, built in 1738 and now housing the picture room of the city museum, the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte (Tues-Sun 8.30am-7.30pm; L14,000/¬7.23). The royal apartments, on the first floor, are smaller and more downbeat than those at Caserta but in many ways more enjoyable, not least because you can actually achievement through the rooms freely. That said, you’ll need a keen interest in the Bourbon dynasty to want to linger: high spots are the ballroom, lined with portraits of various Bourbon monarchs and other European despots, and a number of rooms of porcelain, some painted with local scenes and one in particular a sticky confection of Chinese scenes, monkeys and fruit and flowers from the Capodimonte works here. The museum is organized, not chronologically, but by collections: between them the Farnese and Bourbon rulers amassed a superb collection of Renaissance paintings and Flemish works, including a couple of Brueghels - The Misanthrope and The Blind - and two triptychs by Joos van Cleve. There are also canvases by Perugino and Pinturicchio, an elegant vocalist and Child with Angels by Botticelli and Lippi’s soft, sensitive Annunciation . Later works include many Titians, with a number of paintings of the shrewd Farnese Pope Paul III in various states of ageing and the lascivious Danae ; Raphael’s austere portrait of Leo X and a worldly Clement VII by Sebastiano del Piombo; and Bellini’s impressively coloured and composed Transfiguration .

Naples isn’t really a city of museums - there’s more on the streets that’s worth perceptive on the whole, and most displays of interest are kept in situ in churches, palaces and the like. However, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Mon & Wed-Sun 9am-7.30pm; L12,000/¬6.20; reachable direct by bus #110 from Piazza Garibaldi) is an exception, home to the Farnese collection of antiquities from Lazio and Campania and the best of the finds from the nearby Roman sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Currently the museum is undergoing a comprehensive restoration, and there’s a good chance you won’t be healthy to see it all. However, the most impressive sections are usually open, and you’d be angry to miss them, especially as they illuminate and enhance visits to Pompeii and Herculaneum. The ground floor of the museum concentrates on sculpture from the Farnese collection , displayed at its best in the mighty Great Hall, which holds imperial-era figures like the Farnese Bull and Farnese Hercules from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome - the former the largest piece of classical sculpture ever found. The mezzanine floor holds the museum’s collection of mosaics - remarkably preserved works all, giving a superb insight into ordinary Roman customs, beliefs and humour. All are worth looking at - images of fish, crustacea, wildlife on the banks of the Nile, a cheeky cat and quail with still-life beneath, masks and simple nonfigurative decoration. But some highlights to look out for include a realistic Battle Scene (no. 10020), the Three Musicians with Dwarf (no. 9985), an urbane meeting of the Platonic Academy (no. 124545), and a marvellously captured scene from a comedy The Consultation of the Fattucchiera (no. 9987), with a soothsayer giving a dour and doomy prediction.

At the far end of the mezzanine is the fascinating Gabinetto Segreto (Secret Room), which reopened in 2000 after nearly thirty years. The room contains erotic material taken from the brothels, baths, houses and taverns of Pompeii and Herculaneum - to see the display, which lurks tantalizingly behind a partition, you need to obtain a timed ticket (no extra charge) from the entrance hall. The objects in the collection weren’t always segregated in this way; it was the shocked Duke of Calabria who, having taken his wife and daughter to view the museum, decided that the offending objects should be removed from the gaze of ladies. From then until the time of Garibaldi they were kept under lock and key, disappearing again from public view in the twentieth century for long periods. The artefacts, from languidly sensual wall-paintings to preposterously phallic lamps, bear testimony to Roman licentiousness, although the phallus was often used as a kind of lucky charm rather than as a sexual symbol - cheerfully hung outside taverns and bakeries to ward off the evil eye. Free English-language tours of the Gabinetto are admirably serious and smut-free, though it is hard to repress a giggle at the sculpture of a man whose toga is imperfectness to mask an erection, or at the graphic but elegantly executed marble of Pan “seducing” a goat.

Upstairs through the Salone della Meridiana, which holds a sparse but fine assortment of Roman figures (notably a wonderfully strained Atlas and some demure female figures - Roman replicas of Greek originals), a series of rooms holds the Campanian surround paintings , lifted from the villas of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and rich in colour and invention. There are plenty here, and it’s worth devoting some time to this section, which includes works from the Sacrarium - part of Pompeii’s Egyptian temple of Isis, the most celebrated mystery cult of antiquity - the discovery of which gave a major boost to Egyptomania at the end of the eighteenth century. In the next series of rooms, some of the smallest and most easily missed works are among the most exquisite. Among those to look out for are a paternal Achilles and Chirone (no. 9109); the Sacrifice of Iphiginia (no. 9112) in the next room, one of the best preserved of all the murals; the dignified Dido forsaken by Aeneas and the Personification of Africa (no. 8998); and the series of frescoes telling the story of the Trojan horse. Look out too for the group of four small pictures, the best of which is a depiction of a woman gathering flowers entitled Allegoria della Primavera - a fluid, impressionistic piece of work capturing both the gentleness of spring and the graceful beauty of the woman.

Beyond the murals are the actual finds from the Campanian cities - everyday items like glass, silver, ceramics, charred pieces of rope, even foodstuffs (petrified cakes, figs, fruit and nuts), together with a model layout of Pompeii in cork. On the other side of the first floor, there are finds from one particular house, the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum - sculptures in bronze mainly. The Hermes at Rest in the centre of the second room is perhaps the most arresting item, rapt with exhaustion, but around are other adept statues - of athletes, suffused with movement, a languid Resting Satyr , the convincingly woozy Drunken Silenus , and, in the final room, portrait busts of soldiers and various local big cheeses.

Piazza Trieste e Trento marks the beginning of the city’s main shopping street, Via Toledo - or, to give it its official name, Via Roma - which leads north in a dead straight line, climbing the hill up to the national archeological museum and separating two very different parts of Naples. To its right, crossways as far as Piazza Gesù Nuovo, the streets and buildings are modern and spacious, centring on the unmistakeable mass of the Fascist-era central Post Office . The streets to the left, on the other hand, scaling the footslopes of the Vómero, are some of the city’s most narrow and crowded, a grid of alleys that was ordered out to house Spanish troops during the seventeenth century and is hence known now as the Quartiere Spagnoli . It’s an enticing area, at least for visitors, in that it’s what you expect to find when you come to Naples, with the buildings so close together as to barely admit any sunlight. But it’s as poor a part of Italy as you’ll find, home to the notorious Neapolitan bassi - one-room windowless dwellings that open directly onto the street - and as such a national disgrace. Further up Via Toledo, just north of Piazza Carità on the edge of the old part of the city, the church of Monteoliveto was rebuilt after a sound wartime bombing, but it holds some of the city’s finest Renaissance art, including a room frescoed by Vasari, a rather startling almost life-size pietà of eight figures by Guido Mazzoni (the faces are said to be portraits) and two sculptural works by Antonio Rossellino - a nativity scene and the tomb of Mary of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand I.

Continuing on up the hill, Piazza Dante is another Neapolitan square that looks as if it has seen better days, designed by Luigi Vanvitelli during the eighteenth century and cutting an elegant semicircle off to the right of the main road that focuses on a statue of the poet. There are a couple of restaurants here, and it’s a turnaround point for buses, but otherwise - unless you want to take a right through the seventeenth-century Port’Alba into Piazza composer and the old part of the city - you may as well near on up the street to the archeological museum, housed in a grandiose, late-sixteenth-century army barracks on the corner of Piazza Cavour.

The Duomo , sharp on the right and tucked away unassumingly from the main street, is a Gothic building from the primeval thirteenth century (though with a late nineteenth-century neo-Gothic facade) dedicated to the patron fear of the city, San Gennaro. The church - and fear - are key reference points for Neapolitans: San Gennaro was martyred at Pozzuoli, just outside Naples, in 305 AD under the purges of Diocletian. Tradition has it that, when his body was transferred here, two phials of his blood liquefied in the bishop’s hands, since which time the “miracle” has continued to repeat itself no less than three times a year - on the first Saturday in May (when a procession leads from the church of Santa Chiara to the cathedral) and on September 19 and December 16. There is still much superstition surrounding this event: San Gennaro is seen as the saviour and protector of Naples, and if the blood refuses to liquefy - which luckily is rare - disaster is supposed to befall the city, and many still move with bated breath to see if the miracle has occurred. Interestingly, one of the few times this century Gennaro’s blood hasn’t turned was in 1944, an event followed by Vesuvius’s last eruption. The last times were in 1980, the year of the earthquake, and in 1988, the day after which city lost an important football match to their rivals, Milan. The miraculous liquefaction takes place during a special Mass in full view of the congregation - a service it’s perfectly doable to attend , though the church authorities have yet to allow any close scientific examination of the blood or the “miraculous” process. Whatever the truth of the miracle, there’s no question it’s still a significant event in the Neapolitan calendar, and one of the more bizarre of the city’s institutions.

The first chapel on the right as you achievement into the cathedral is dedicated to San Gennaro and holds the precious phials of the saint’s blood and his skull in a silver bust-reliquary from 1305. On the other side of the church, the basilica of Santa Restituta is almost a church in its own right, officially the oldest structure in Naples, erected by Constantine in 324 and supported by columns that were taken from a temple to Apollo on this site. The Baptistry , too (Mon-Fri 9am-noon & 4.30-7pm; L5000/¬2.58) contains relics from very primeval Christian times, including a late fifth-century structure preserving fragments of contemporary mosaics and a font believed to have been taken from a temple to Dionysus. Downstairs, the crypt (same ticket as for the baptistry) of San Gennaro is one of the finest examples of Renaissance art in Naples, founded by Cardinal Carafa and holding the tombs of both San Gennaro and Pope Innocent IV.