One straight Greek street cuts the old city in half — that is what the name means, and from above you can see the cut. Walking it takes forty minutes. Doing it properly takes a day, because everything worth stopping for is within thirty metres of the line.
Centro Storico · Naples, Campania
In order. Skip any of them and the walk still works — the street is the point.
Start with your back to the spiked stone face of the Gesù Nuovo church — a palace wall that was never meant to be a façade. Inside is baroque at full volume. The obelisk in the middle of the square is where the walk begins.
The majolica cloister is the single most photographed thing in old Naples and it earns it — every column and bench is tiled in yellow and blue eighteenth-century ceramic. The church next door is free and worth ten minutes; the cloister is not, and is worth all of them.
The booksellers’ street, now a two-metre-wide corridor of workshops, nativity-figure makers and coffee bars with no seats. Do not plan this stretch. Walk it slowly and look up — the palazzo doorways are the whole point.
The Veiled Christ. Marble carved so thin the shroud reads as cloth, in a chapel small enough that thirty people fill it. This is the one stop on the walk that people travel to Naples for.
Greek quarries, Roman aqueduct, wartime shelter — forty metres down, on a guided tour that runs hourly. There are three different underground sites within five minutes of here and they are not the same; this is the one with the candle-lit narrow passage.
One street north is the pizza street. The famous two have queues of ninety minutes from noon; four doors down there are places just as good with none. Either take a number at 11:30 and go and do stop 5 while you wait, or eat at 15:00.
The nativity-scene street, worked year-round by families who have made the figures for four generations. In December it is impassable. In February you can watch them being carved.
The doll hospital — a genuine repair workshop, open since 1895, with shelves of limbs and heads waiting for owners. It is small, it is strange, and it takes a quarter of an hour.
Three churches stacked into one, including a fourth-century basilica you reach through a side door most visitors walk past. The San Gennaro chapel holds the blood that liquefies three times a year, and the city genuinely stops to watch.
Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy, still hanging over the altar it was painted for in 1607. A balcony upstairs lets you look at it at eye level, which almost nobody uses.
A hundred metres from Garibaldi station, in an alley that smells of hot pastry from the corner. Eat it standing, in the two minutes before the shell goes soft. Then take the metro.
Everything is within thirty metres of the street. The two detours are marked.
Cappella Sansevero weeks ahead; the other two a day or two.
Metro line 1 to Dante, then five minutes on foot. Do not drive.
Churches close for four hours at lunch. Start at 09:00 or lose the afternoon.
Covered shoulders for the churches, and a bag you can wear in front.
The first half of the old city, north of the line, in a single morning.
Up by funicular to Castel Sant’Elmo, down through the Spanish Quarter on foot.
Circumvesuviana out at 08:00, the crater after lunch, back for dinner in Naples.
