Naples, the old city between the castle and the volcano

Naples has a reputation, and it has worked hard for it. The traffic is chaotic, the scooters come at you along pavements, the washing hangs across the alleys and everybody seems to be talking at once. Visitors who come for Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast often pass through it as quickly as they can. That is a pity, because the old centre of Naples is something rare: a city founded by Greeks, still living in the streets they laid out, with a castle on a rock in the sea at one end and a volcano across the bay at the other.

The Greek grid

The first settlement here was on the little island of Megaride, by the shore, founded by Greek colonists from Cumae further up the coast and associated with the Siren Parthenope, whose name the place took. In the fifth century BC a new city was laid out on the higher ground inland, and called simply the new city, Neapolis. That name, worn down, is Naples.

The Greeks built Neapolis on a grid: three long streets running east to west, crossed at right angles by narrow lanes running north to south, with rectangular blocks between them. The Romans called the long streets decumani, and the name has stuck. They are still there. The lowest of them is the street known as Spaccanapoli, "split Naples", which runs dead straight through the old centre for so long that from the hill above it really does look as if the city had been cut in two. The historic centre became a World Heritage Site in 1995, with UNESCO describing it as a city that has kept its original urban structure from antiquity to the present, and the city's own tourist office calls it the largest historic centre in Europe.

Walking it is the point. Spaccanapoli and the upper decumano, the Via dei Tribunali, are lined with churches, palaces, shrines set into walls, bakeries, pizzerias and small shops, and the lanes between them are where daily life spills out of doorways. The Via San Gregorio Armeno, running between the two, is the street of the nativity-scene makers, whose workshops sell figures of shepherds, saints, angels and, increasingly, footballers and politicians. Below the streets, too, there is another Naples, a maze of old quarries, cisterns and tunnels cut into the soft volcanic stone the city is built from, some of which can be visited with a guide.

The cathedral, on Via del Duomo at the edge of the grid, holds the relics of San Gennaro, the city's patron saint, among them two glass vials of his dried blood. On his feast days the faithful gather to see whether the blood will liquefy, and the city takes the answer seriously: a miracle is a good omen, and its failure a bad one.

The castles on the shore

Down at the waterfront, the sea end of the view belongs to two castles. The older is the Castel dell'Ovo, the castle of the egg, built on the rock of Megaride where the first Greek settlement stood. Its oldest parts go back to the Normans in the twelfth century, and it is usually called the oldest castle in Naples. The name comes from a medieval legend that the poet Virgil, who was thought in the Middle Ages to have been a magician, hid an egg in its foundations, and that if the egg ever broke, the castle and the city would fall with it. The little harbour of Borgo Marinari at its foot is full of fishing boats and restaurant tables, and the walls give a view right round the bay.

A short walk away is the Castel Nuovo, the "new castle", which is new only by Naples standards: it was first built in 1279 under the Angevin kings, and later rebuilt by the Aragonese, who set a white marble triumphal arch between its dark towers. It was a royal seat of the kings of Naples for centuries, and its bulk still dominates the port where the ferries leave for Capri and the islands.

The volcano across the bay

From almost anywhere on the waterfront the other end of the view is Vesuvius, the broad, double-humped mountain across the bay. It is the volcano that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in the Roman age, and it is not finished. Its last eruption, in March 1944, came while the Allies held Naples during the Second World War, and the mountain is watched closely to this day. The towns spread round its lower slopes, and the city lives with the mountain as it lives with everything else, with a shrug and a shrine.

For most visitors the day trips are the reason to be here: Pompeii and Herculaneum, Sorrento, the Amalfi Coast and the islands. But give the old city at least one full day of its own, and eat a pizza in the city that made it famous.

Holidays that include Naples

Just You's seven-night Pompeii, Sorrento & the Bay of Naples in Winter includes Naples, Pompeii, Minori on the Amalfi Coast and Sorrento.

Travelsphere's seven-night Christmas on the Amalfi Coast, Pompeii & Paestum takes in Naples and Pompeii, the coast at Amalfi, Minori and Ravello, the Amalfi hills, Salerno, and the Greek temples of Paestum, which make an apt companion to the Greek streets of Naples.

Explore's seven-night Amalfi Coast Walking, based at the Hotel Risorgimento, walks the coast and its hills, with San Lazzaro, Bomerano, Ravello, Scala, Atrani, Amalfi and Positano, and also takes in Capri, Pompeii, Herculaneum and Naples. It departs in March, April, May, June, August, September and October.

On any of them, Naples rewards the traveller who arrives with patience, comfortable shoes and an appetite. It is not a tidy city, and it has never pretended to be.