NAPLES INTRODUCTION, Introduction

Hi, my name’s James, and I’m your personal guide. Along with MyWoWo, I’d like to welcome you to one of the wonders of the world: the ancient city of Naples.

Founded almost four thousand years ago, Naples was already a large city when it became a Greek colony, and for almost five hundred years was the capital of a kingdom that at one point comprised the whole of southern Italy.

Naples Old Town is the largest in Europe, and along the famous Spaccanapoli, the road that splits the city into two, you’ll find monuments, buildings from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque period, and many of the city’s legendary 500 churches, each with its own history and unique style.

Today Naples is a metropolis with over a million inhabitants, and the city as it stands today is the result of two major periods of reconstruction. The first followed a severe cholera epidemic in 1884, when, in order to safeguard the population’s health, numerous buildings, including some fine constructions, were demolished and replaced with new bourgeois buildings, in the umbertino style, named after the King of Italy Umberto I.

Two of the city’s main streets, Via Duomo and Via del Rettifilo, also date back to this period.

The second period of reconstruction came after 1945, because Naples had been heavily bombed during the Second World War, due to the importance of the city’s port....