Whatever your real interest is in Campania, the chances are that you'll wind up in NAPLES - capital of the region and, indeed, of the whole Italian south. It's the kind of city laden with visitors' preconceptions, and it rarely disappoints: it is filthy, it is very large and overbearing, it is crime-infested, and it is most definitely like nowhere else in Italy - something the inhabitants will be keener than anyone to tell you. In all these things lies the city's charm. Perhaps the feeling that you're somewhere unique makes it possible to endure the noise and harassment, perhaps it's the feeling that in less than three hours you've travelled from an ordinary part of Europe to somewhere akin to an Arab bazaar. One thing, though, is certain: a couple of days here and you're likely to be as staunch a defender of the place as its most devoted inhabitants. Few cities on earth inspire such fierce loyalties.
In Naples, all the pride and resentment of the Italian south, all the historical differences between the two wildly disparate halves of Italy, are sharply brought into focus. This is the true heart of the mezzogiorno , a lawless, petulant city that has its own way of doing things. It's a city of extremes, fiercely Catholic, its streets punctuated by bright neon Madonnas cut into niches, its miraculous cults regulating the lives of the people much as they have always done. Football, too, is a religion here: frenzied celebrations went on for weeks after Napoli, with their hero Maradona to the fore, wrested the Italian championship from the despised north in 1987. Support is not as fanatical as it used to be, though the club is currently enjoying some success again in Italy's Serie A.
Music, also, has played a key part in the city's identity: there's long been a Naples style, bound up with the city's strange, harsh dialect - and, to some extent, the long-established presence of the US military: American jazz lent a flavour to Neapolitan traditional songs in the Fifties; and the Seventies saw one of Italy's most concentrated musical movements in the urban blues scene of Pino Daniele and the music around the radical Alfa Romeo factory out at Pomigliano. More recently, a distinctive style of Neapolitan rap emerged from the centri sociali or "social centres" - groups of left-wing urban activists who challenge the establishment. The most famous exponents of this kind of rap are 99 Posse, who joined forces with Bisca to record Guai a Chi ci Tocca ( Trouble for Those who Touch Us ), which documented a brutal police attack on a peaceful student demonstration in Naples in 1994.
The City
Naples is a surprisingly large city, and a sprawling one, with a centre that has many different focuses. The area between Piazza Garibaldi and Via Toledo, roughly corresponding to the old Roman Neapolis (much of which is still unexcavated below the ground), makes up the old part of the city - the centro storico - the main streets still following the path of the old Roman roads. This is much the liveliest, most teeming part of town, an open-air kasbah of hawking, yelling humanity that makes up in energy what it lacks in grace. Buildings rise high on either side of the narrow, crowded streets, cobwebbed with washing; there's little light, not even much sense of the rest of the city outside - certainly not of the proximity of the sea.
But the insularity of the centro storico is deceptive, and in reality there's another, quite different side to Naples, one that's much more like the sunwashed Bay of Naples murals you've seen in cheap restaurants back home. Via Toledo , the main street of the city, edges the old centre from the Palazzo Reale up to the Museo Nazionale Archeologico and the heights of Capodimonte ; to the left rises the Vómero , with its fancy housing and museums, and the smug neighbourhood of Chiaia , beyond which lies the long green boulevard of Riviera de Chiara , stretching around to the districts of Mergellina and Posillipo : all neighbourhoods that exert quite a different kind of pull - that of an airy waterfront city, with views, seafood eaten al fresco and peace and quiet.
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