This week’s dream: Exploring Naples, Italy’s wild child

Naples, Italy, “has become more beautiful than Paris,” said Lawrence Osborne in Condé Nast Traveler. More than a century ago, travelers often compared the two, but now it’s no contest. Entering Naples today, “what strikes you at first is her cinematic beauty, her grand visual opera.” But unlike Paris and Europe’s other storied capitals, Naples “has an energy that is disjointed, feral, and madcap,” with pleasures spread out in her streets rather than behind closed doors. The perfect visitor must cultivate a taste for both “mild rogues” and chilled white wines, for colorful clusters of transvestite drug addicts and flaky pastries stuffed with orange-scented cream. Naples is “open to atavism and kitsch, to gluttony and wonderful vulgarity. In other words, she is alive.”

During a recent stay, I returned again and again to the city’s ancient heart, defined by three parallel Greek-built streets known as the Decumani. Churches, tenements, and decaying palaces crowd in on a pedestrian in this “dark, brooding core,” and “the sheer closeness of the past” proved addictive. “But Naples is many cities,” and the others offer rewards too. The affluent live and play in enclaves like Vomero, a hillside district where art nouveau villas are surrounded by gated gardens. Even the drab suburbs hide treasures, including “some of the greatest—and least-known—Roman ruins in Europe.” Just hop a commuter train and you’re there.

In a Mafia city that takes odd pride in its outlaws, a chance for a secret tour of the Villa Pausilypon couldn’t be refused. The villa’s first owner was a merchant so vile that Cicero said of him, “I never saw a more worthless man.” But the scoundrel’s 2,100-year-old cliff-top palace “was, and is, magnificent, even in ruins.” While there, my guide pointed out a nearby home where a wealthy couple were bludgeoned to death by their gardener. Then he brightened, somehow flashing on a memory of one of the city’s oldest restaurants. “By the way, have you eaten the ricotta at Mimì alla Ferrovia?” he asked. “It’s extraordinary. Two blind, crippled ladies make it in their bathtub.”

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At the Grand Hotel Parker’s (grandhotelparkers.it), doubles start at $182.