Amphitheatrically set around a curving waterfront, Naples extends from the Campi Flegrei to the slopes of Vesuvius. The autostrada tunnels in from Posillipo on the west, and comes in from Pompei on the east, right up to the main railway station.

Via Roma, running north from Piazza Plebiscito near the front, splits Naples in two. Its extension, Corso Amadeo di Savoia, takes you to the royal palace of Capodimonte in the northern suburbs. In its fine park are a porcelain factory and a museum noted for silver-work and weaponry. Capodimonte and another royal palace on the front recall the Bourbon heyday, the 18thC, when the Spanish king’s eldest son took the title King of Naples.

Important sights convenient to the Maritime Station on the harbour include the 13thC Angevin castle and the San Carlo, an opera theatre second only to La Scala in Milan (Naples is the city not only of Punchinello and pizza but also of Caruso).

Museums abound. An amusing one is the Pignatelli Cortes on Riviera di Chiaia, two blocks from the front, where all the panoply of the elaborate Neapolitan festivals is on display. Chiaia ends at Castel dell’ Ovo, supposedly built on an egg, which guards the breakwater of Santa Lucia. Yacht moorings, restaurants and a busy ferryboat traffic have brought the old slummy Santa Lucia quarter up in the world.

For the Naples stereotype, the sordid malodorous steps, alleyways, lofty nodding tenements and a teeming population, go behind Santa Lucia into the Spaccanapoli district. Scores of blackened churches with nothing remarkable inside stand on a network of underground lanes and passages which give old Naples a sinister dimension. (They say Naples has more catacombs than Rome.)

The Italian Government, 100 years ago, seriously proposed to demolish Naples: there seemed no other answer to its squalor and disease. But that would have deprived us of many monuments of grandeur, of brilliant street markets and a lovable citizenry.

There is a brighter, airier Naples. Sail over the Comero’s boulevards and smart shops in the cable-car from Cumana station, alight on Montesanto and a ‘high town’ of viewpoints, notably Villa La Floridiana (the national Ceramics Museum), Castel Sant’ Elmo and the Charterhouse gardens of San Martino.

The National Archaeological Museum on the road to Capodimonte embraces Greek and Roman history and the Borgia collections of Egyptian treasures. Do not miss the Farnese Bull, a massive work carved from a single block of red marble; or the Aphrodite ascribed to the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles (350 BC).