See Naples to live: A chaotic city delivers abundant rewards for those willing to embrace it

Naples is an assault on the senses.

It is the loudest city I’ve ever visited. Car and scooter horns vie with sirens and church bells. Planes rumble overhead toward an airport close to the city centre. The average Neapolitan speaks at a genial shout and works up. Your eyes will need sunglasses not just to shade them from the southern sun hitting a dazzling palette of building colours, but to knock back the fierce visual cacophony of graffiti that covers most surfaces. Exceptional Baroque architecture and Liberty-style statement buildings do battle with centuries of grime and crumbling plaster. Your nose will recoil from car exhausts, the ripe waft of an occasional sewer and old-world levels of smoking. That will soon be countered by the Neapolitan proclivity for strong perfumes and aftershaves and glorious gusts of oregano, tomato, baking dough and charcoal.

Life is lived on the streets but there are few green spaces or spots of solitude. Getting anywhere requires weaving and diving around crowds packed into narrow lanes. Keep one eye always on the ground: streets and pavements are as patchy as a teenager’s skin, with cobbles erupting and holes gaping. Keep the other eye on constant watch for scooters that speed out of nowhere and treat rules of the road with a cheerful disdain. “Vespa” is the Italian word for “wasp”; a triumph of product naming.

Naples is one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in Europe. It was a significant port and cultural hotspot within the Ancient Greek world in the 5th century BC, when the Romans were just a backwater tribe dreaming of expansion. That’s why so much of the city feels like a hotch potch. There is nothing truly new; everything in layered upon the past. The look of the 17th and 18th centuries dominates the main tourist districts. This is when Naples was at its richest and most powerful, with an enormous cultural significance. This, not Rome or Florence, was the must-see climax of the Grand Tour.

It’s quite an irony, then, that today’s Naples seems far less damaged by tourism than Italian cities further north. Venice and much of Tuscany now feel like cultural theme parks staffed by Italians for the benefit of … and to extract cash from … foreigners. Naples is crowded. Traffic is a constant and you’ll be jostled by humanity almost everywhere, but the majority were locals going about their daily lives. We were welcomed, but we were an addition to the life of the city and not the reason for it.

The most obvious example was Sunday evening in a triangle formed by the Castel Nuovo, the Castel d’Ovo and the Piazza della Repubblica, all jammed with people as if it were some massive festival, or crowds were exiting a football match. Nope, just the usual weekend passeggiata in a picturesque part of the city, where the population spills onto the street to promenade, gossip, dance, drink and eat.

There are, of course, tourists here. In high season more than 10,000 a day spill off the cruise ships docking at Beverello, according to one of our taxi drivers. But the majority of tourists … as I did on my first visit in childhood … are only passing through the city en route to Pompeii or Capri. Most of the tourist groups we rubbed shoulders with were Italian teenagers on school trips. Only Spaccanapoli, the long, straight lane that cuts through the heart of the historic district, was truly hard going. But even in the most touristy areas I heard as much Italian as anything else. 

This perspective may, admittedly, come from the time of year of our visit and, more importantly, where we stayed.

Locals continually told us that April and May are ideal times of year. It’s warm but not too hot, generally sunny, with flowers and trees bursting into life. Schools around the world are still in session so the main flow of foreign tourists hasn’t started.

We rented an apartment in the Rione Sanità, a neighbourhood I was distinctly warned not to go near on mylast visit twenty years ago. Times have changed. As with gentrification trends everywhere, the neighbourhood’s cheap rents attracted artists and other creative types. More trend setters followed. Now the local pizzeria is listed in the Michelin Guide and is angling for a star. (Review to come.) This is the best place to stay if you want to have a more authentic Neapolitan experience, for a better price than the traditional tourist hotels.

It still looks rough. Renovation may be taking place inside but from the exterior most of the buildings are streaked with dirt and missing chunks of plaster. One local explained that the city’s UNESCO world heritage site listing is more curse than blessing. It brings the visitors and preserves the history, but strict rules on renovation mean nobody can afford to fix anything.

I think many visitors … particularly Americans … equate that general look of decay with danger. We never felt unsafe, even when taking a wrong turn and twisting though small lanes after dark. There are far more beggars and homeless people lurking in doorways in London than we encountered here. The only real threat are motorbikes racing down small lanes at high speed; it’s essential to move towards the wall whenever you hear a beep behind you. In fact, the neighbourhood was so friendly that by our fifth morning, as we walked down our now familiar little lane with our luggage, the locals in all the small shops along the way smiled and waved goodbye.

Our apartment, Cerasiello, was idyllic. Like almost everything in Naples, its rough exterior belies what you’ll find inside. You enter through a tiny door in battered, ancient gates set in a massive, near featureless building that takes up a whole city block. You find yourself in a courtyard, sky visible four very tall stories above. 

It’s all a bit dingy and the first thing you’ll notice is the rather ugly lift dropped into the middle of the far side of the courtyard, looking like those temporary ones they erect on construction sites. As your eyes adjust to the half light, however, you’ll notice that all four stories of the wall behind the lift are dominated by a grand staircase, crumbling but still magnificent. 

Before the neighbourhood went into decline, it was full of grand palaces, and this was one of them. Once the heavy courtyard door shuts, the noise of the street disappears and the songbirds kept by residents overlooking the courtyard contribute a gentler soundtrack. Potted plants and hanging laundry jostle for space on windows, walls and landings.

Cerasiello is on the top floor. I was very glad of that lift, even though you need to feed it €.20 a ride. The property has four bedrooms, each with en-suite bathroom, surrounding a long sitting room, a small kitchen and a truly magnificent roof garden with a view of Vesuvius. We spent most of our time at home out here, surrounded by enormous potted plants that made it feel like a real oasis from the city. 

The tasteful decor is a mash-up of traditional Italian with a bit of Sicilian and North African, giving the whole place a slightly exotic feel. The owners have taken great care with the lighting, including up lighters on the roof garden and small, stained glass table lamps inside to create atmospheric puddles of light throughout.

You can book individual rooms rather than renting the whole property; in which case the living room, kitchen and roof garden become shared space with other guests. If you only rented one room, ask for the one with french doors that open directly to the roof garden. The window in the bedroom looks towards Vesuvius, while the one in the bathroom looks over the roofs and church domes of Rione Sanità and up at Castel Sant’Elmo. 

Cerasiello is on the very edge of Rione Sanità, only about 200 metres from the Via Foria that divides the neighbourhood from the historic centre. You’re only 10-15 minutes away from key sites like the archaeological museum, the Duomo, the cloisters at Santa Chiara and the street of the nativity scene makers. You’re also close to two different metro stations, though I confess that with four of us to split the cost we took taxis when we needed to go further than our feet would carry us.

Our roof garden and the feeling of being part of a local neighbourhood provided a welcome counterpoint to the noise and bustle of the city. Naples is a perpetual motion machine. It is exhausting and brutal, yet glorious and full of joy. It isn’t an easy city in which to be a tourist, but effort pays vast rewards in the treasures you see, the craftsmanship you can buy and the people you meet. The guys who made us coffee every morning felt like friends by the end of our long weekend.

Neapolitans themselves will tell you that the unique character of this place is due to its position directly beneath one of the world’s most menacing volcanoes. Vesuvius’ last big explosion … the one that buried Pompeii, blew the mountain’s top off and exerted a force equivalent to two atomic bombs … was nearly 2,000 years ago. Most vulcanologists say it's overdue for another major eruption. People live here with a constant awareness of death, reinforced by a muscular Catholicism that reminds people of death and resurrection in every church.

Even the most famous tourist line about the city brings up endings. “See Naples and then die” was the phrase constantly repeated by Grand Tourists, most memorably in Goethe’s letters home. The meaning was that you’d reached the best of everything here, and you didn’t need to see anything else for artistic and cultural fulfilment.

These days I’d change that phrase to “See Naples to live.” I can’t think of anywhere else that’s so chaotically, marvellously, exhaustingly alive.