The Castel Nuovo, so called to distinguish it from the older Castel dell’Ovo, was founded in 1279 by Charles I of Naples (Charles of Anjou). One of many Neapolitan landmarks to bear interchangeable names, it is known locally as the Maschio Angioino, in reference to Charles’s Angevin origins and from the southern Italian convention that a show of power is necessarily male. There, in the 14th century, the brilliant court of King Robert welcomed Petrarch and Boccaccio, and Giotto was summoned to execute frescoes (now lost). The castle was embellished by Alfonso V of Aragon (Alfonso I of Naples), whose triumphal entry into Naples in 1443 supplies the theme of magnificent Renaissance sculptures over the west entrance. The castle, containing important late medieval and Renaissance decoration, now houses municipal bodies and an institute of Neapolitan history with an important library. At the west end of Piazza del Municipio, the Naples city hall incorporates, in a handsome structure of the 1820s, a 16th-century church.

The waterfront road continues past docklands, skirting on its inner side the popular church of Santa Maria del Carmine. The nearby Piazza del Mercato, a lively scene of morning markets, was also, in past centuries, a place of execution. Bombardment of the port of Naples during World War II obliterated much of the character of this section of shoreline, and the road itself diverges in the industrial zone of San Giovanni a Teduccio (a name that possibly recalls that of Theodosius). Visible history resumes in the approach to Portici and the Vesuvian shore.

Inland above Piazza del Municipio, the San Martino Hill is surmounted by a former Carthusian monastery—now an important museum of paintings and objects concerned with the history of Naples—and by the massive abutment of Castel Sant’Elmo. Both are of Angevin origins. The castle, founded in 1329 by Robert of Anjou, was re-created in the 16th century, under the Spanish viceroys, in the form of a six-pointed star. Within the complex of the former San Martino monastery, the church itself is rich in paintings and marble decoration of the Neapolitan Baroque. From the adjoining museum, one passes to a terraced garden with an incomparable panorama of Naples and the bay.

South of Piazza del Municipio, beyond the Castel Nuovo, stands the red complex of the Royal Palace, whose northeast wing, set in a small park, houses the great collections of the National Library of Naples. The main facade of the Royal Palace grandly faces, southwest across the vast Piazza del Plebiscito, the basilica of San Francesco di Paola, which—erected in royal thanksgiving for the restoration of Bourbon rule (1815)—is modeled on the Pantheon of Rome. The palace, created by Domenico Fontana early in the 17th century, now houses government offices and a notable picture gallery. Above San Francesco di Paola to the southwest, the rise of Monte di Dio is crowned by two important churches: the 17th-century Santa Maria degli Angeli and the 18th-century Nunziatella.

Adjacent to the palace on the north is the San Carlo opera house, which has heard and inspired many of the great artists of bel canto. Although the prodigious musical creativity of 18th-century Naples has no modern parallel, the San Carlo remains an important element of Europe’s musical life. Across the busy intersection from the San Carlo, the late 19th-century arcades of the cruciform Galleria Umberto I serve, under their glass cupola, as an ornate meeting place. The arcades were familiar ground to Allied servicemen in the closing phase of World War II, a dramatic period recalled in such writings as John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947), Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (1978), and the macabre La pelle (1949; The Skin) by the politically volatile Curzio Malaparte, while early postwar disaffection is portrayed in Raffaele La Capria’s Un giorno d’impazienza (1952; A Day of Impatience). Immediately south, on Piazza Trieste e Trento, the 17th-century church of San Ferdinando has traditionally given the Stabat Mater of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi—composed in 1736 for this confraternity—during Easter Week.

Via Toledo

From Piazza Trieste e Trento, the teeming thoroughfare of Via Toledo—named for the Spanish viceroy Don Pedro di Toledo, who laid it out in 1536—passes north into the dense centre of Naples. Its innumerable shops interspersed with grand churches, Via Toledo is banked with 17th- and 18th-century palazzi whose former magnificence has been turned to commercial or municipal use or—as in the case of the mighty Palazzo Maddaloni—has been allowed to lapse into residential decay. On the slope above Via Toledo, steep alleys climb toward San Martino through a zone that, preserving its labyrinthine 17th-century structure, is still known as the Spanish Quarter. The lower line of Via Toledo is interrupted at Piazza Carità by structures built during the Fascist and postwar eras.

Debouching into the Neoclassical hemicycle of Piazza Dante, Via Toledo resumes its route under other names, skirting the western flank of the National Archaeological Museum in its ascent toward Capodimonte.

Piazza Dante forms part of the western boundary to the district that, lying along three principal decumani (streets of orientation) of the Greek and Roman town, has comprised the city’s heart since ancient times. Beyond the picturesque Alba Gate this district is introduced, at the western extreme of Via Tribunali, by the historic Naples Conservatory of Music and its great adjoining Gothic church of San Pietro a Maiella. Via Tribunali, the decumanus maior of Greco-Roman Naples, extends east for approximately one mile, terminating at the law courts near the old Capuana Gate. At its western end, the Renaissance Pontano Chapel (in decay) recalls the humanist Giovanni Pontano, who lived in Naples under Aragonese rule, while the older origins of the contiguous Baroque church of Santa Maria Maggiore are apparent in a Romanesque campanile.

Parallel to Via Tribunali, the upper, briefer Via Anticaglia conserves, within subsequent structures, evident remains of Roman public buildings. The lower parallel—the street that, bearing interim names, becomes Via San Biagio dei Librai—delineates the so-called Spaccanápoli (“Split of Naples”), a designation more loosely applied to all of this ancient centre.

From Piazza del Municipio, Spaccanápoli is approached along the north-northwest trajectory formed by Via Medina and Via Monteoliveto—a route that passes, to the east of Via Monteoliveto, the recessed Renaissance and Baroque complex of Santa Maria la Nova; and, to the west, in a small square, the church of Monteoliveto, or Sant’Anna dei Lombardi, supreme in Naples for its abundance and quality of Renaissance sculpture. From Via Monteoliveto, the short slope called Calata Trinità Maggiore rises to Piazza del Gesù Nuovo, a principal means of access to Spaccanápoli.