Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

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.

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