Naples

Naples began as the Greek Neápolis in the 6th c. BC and has long lived between sea and threat, with Vesuvius and the Bay shaping its dense, vertical city. Roman, medieval, and Baroque layers survive in the historic center, where churches rise over older temples and street life shares space with San Gennaro’s devotion and a fierce local identity. Revered and argued over across Italy, Naples’ cultural intensity is inseparable from hard civic realities—congestion, inequality, and periodic waste crises—so its past is felt as a living, contested present.