The birthplace of pizza — sfogliatella, ragù that simmers since Saturday, pizza fritta from street carts, and Vesuvius on every horizon
Naples is the loudest, most chaotic, most food-obsessed city in Italy — the birthplace of pizza (Neapolitan pizza, the Margherita named for Queen Margherita in 1889 at Pizzeria Brandi, now protected by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity), the city where ragù is started Saturday night for Sunday lunch, where sfogliatella (a ribbed shell-shaped pastry of layered crispy dough filled with ricotta and candied peel) is sold at 6am from pastry shop carts, and where the espresso debate is so deeply personal that Neapolitans will argue about roast ratios with the confidence of people w…
Naples (Neapolis — 'new city' in Greek) was founded as a Greek colony around 470 BCE by settlers from the older Cumae. Absorbed by Rome, sacked by Goths and Byzantines, ruled by Normans, the French Angevin dynasty, the Spanish Crown (Kingdom of Naples 1504–1816), and finally the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies until Garibaldi's 1861 unification. The Spanish period left the densest urban street grid in Europe — the Quartieri Spagnoli was built in 1600 to house Spanish troops with streets so narrow that laundry lines cross between opposite buildings at every floor. WWII devastated the city…