Spear's Wealth Management Survey

See Naples And Die

Crime, filth, squalor and obnoxious, thieving natives - what’s not to hate
about Naples, asks Josh Spero

You emerge from Central Station into something a love-child of Dante and Dickens might have imagined, a cross between sooty, noisy Victorian London and the Inferno’s eighth circle. Wherever you look in Piazza Garibaldi, battered Fiat taxis with flaking leather seats shunt into one another, constantly honking their irritation and packing the entire square without order. A choking black miasma hangs in the air as the taxis’ exhaust pipes belch out thick smoke. The drivers may shout ‘hotel’ to unwary tourists but they’re really advertising a sneering kind of daylight robbery in their death traps.

If you can avoid being knee-capped by one of the taxis as it judders forward, waiting for the filthy train station to disgorge its prey, next you have to dodge the hawkers and peddlers who stand all around the edge, vending someone else’s possessions from snatched suitcases. They strew the pavement with them, flung-open and exposing their contents, and will try to block you bodily as you go, grabbing your elbow or your shoulder to sell you trousers or a mobile phone from a handbag. Pickpockets feel you up until you spin away; it’s a city of not-so-Artful Dodgers.

Automotive disregard for the law and safety is a constant in Naples. Whoever said that traffic lights were merely suggestions in Naples was right on the money; you take your life in your hands crossing a road. Cars do not even allow ambulances to get past: no doubt one of Naples’ many gunshot victims is writhing in agony inside it, but hey, that’s Naples.