Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Piazza Garibaldi is good preparation for the noise, confusion, even menace that make up the rest of the city centre - especially in the streets around, which are sleazy and some of which are best avoided at night if you’re alone. The other side of the square, the centro storico spreads west as far as Via Toledo - the tangled heart of city and its most characteristic quarter. Off the right corner of the square, the Porta Capuana is one of several relics from the Aragonese city walls, a sturdy defensive gate dating from 1490, delicately decorated on one side in Florentine Renaissance style. Across the road, the white and much renovated Castel Capuano was the residence of the Norman king William I, and later, under the Spanish, became a courthouse - which it still is. Behind here, the FORCELLA quarter, which spreads down to Corso Umberto I, is the main city-centre stronghold of the Camorra and home to its most important families. It’s also the city’s open-air market , stamping-ground of yet more contraband tobacco dealers, cassette and sunglasses hawkers, and a quantity of food stalls - chickens sit in boxes inactivity for the chop, after which they’ll be plucked and cleaned up while you wait. As you might fast become aware, the trade in black-market ciggies is an old-established one and takes place throughout the city. It is, like just about every criminal activity in Naples, run by the Camorra, and it used to be a high jobholder for them. Nowadays, though, the big money is in drugs, and the people you’ll see touting cigarettes are mainly little old ladies in need of some extra lira.

The two main streets of the centro storico are Via dei Tribunali and Via San Biagio dei Librai - two narrow streets, lined with old arcaded buildings, which lead due west on the path of the decumanus maximus and decumanus inferiore of Roman times, both charged with region throughout the day, a maelstrom of hurrying pedestrians, revving cars and buzzing, dodging scooters. Via dei Tribunali cuts up to Via Duomo , which ploughs straight through the old town to meet Corso Umberto I and Piazza Nicola Amore, ordered out after a cholera epidemic in 1884 decimated this part of the city. On Via Tribunali, just before Via Duomo, you can’t miss the Capella del Pio Monte della Misericorda (Mon-Sat 9am-2pm; free) - a beautiful octagonal chapel, with paintings by, among others, Caravaggio and Luca Giordano. The chapel was founded in the sixteenth century as a charity to raise money to ransom Christians held in the so-called Barbary States.

Tags: buzzi, camorra, centro storico, city walls, corso umberto, decumanus maximus, florentine renaissance, food stalls, hawkers, main streets, narrow streets, old ladies, piazza garibaldi, porta capuana, renaissance style, roman times, san biagio dei librai, stamping ground, tangled heart, tobacco dealers