Neo Neapolitan

Exuberant, chaotic and scruffy, Naples is hardly the world’s most rational metropolis. But, writes JON WALL, it is where you’ll fi nd the marvellous Hotel Romeo, a bolthole as charismatic and engaging as the city itself

- Jon Wall

A CENTRE OF trade, commerce and culture for three millennia, Naples is one of the oldest urban centres in the world.

Sprawled across the northern shore of one of the Mediterranean’s most perfect bays and overlooked to the east by the brooding presence and smoking summit of Mount Vesuvius, this Italian port city and its environs have also been a playground for at least 2,000 years — prior to their destruction in the eruption of 79CE, the settlements of Pompeii and Herculaneum (the latter has been built over by the suburb of Ercolano) were both popular resorts for wealthy Roman tourists.

But if this inspirationally beautiful region still draws visitors in their droves — they flock to nearby Sorrento, Amalfi Coast and the island of Capri, all justly famous for their intense light, blue skies, shimmering sea, multicoloured villages that cling to coastal cliffs, and the heady scents of flowers and ubiquitous lemon blossom — Naples itself suffers from what might politely be called an image problem. True, its Historic Centre, which was added to the Unesco World Heritage list in the 1990s, remains a fabulous living repository of churches and catacombs, palazzi, piazze and parks, and theatres and galleries. Granted, too, this pullulating city is in the throes of a renaissance and emerging as a focal point of artistic creativity; it’s also the cradle of a strain of dandified masculine style. But it does suffer from a reputation as a hotbed of poverty and crime, which lends a certain frisson to the old town’s narrow, shaded alleyways and hardly serves as an encouragement to visit.