Places to see in Naples

A Bourbon palace on a hill above the city holding one of Italy's best painting collections — Caravaggio's Flagellation, Titian, Masaccio, Bruegel — in rooms that are frequently almost empty. The park around it is free and full of Neapolitan families at the weekend. Half a day including the climb up.

Forty metres under the old centre: Greek quarries, Roman aqueducts, and the cisterns the city sheltered in during the bombing. Guided only, about an hour and a half, and one optional passage is narrow enough that it is honestly not for everyone. Cool underground whatever August is doing above.

Early Christian burial galleries cut into the tuff, frescoed from the second century onward, and far roomier than the word catacomb suggests — these are wide corridors rather than crawlspaces. Guided, run by a local cooperative, and easily paired with Capodimonte on the same hill.

Making two kinds of pizza and nothing else since 1870 — marinara or margherita, marble tables, a ticket and a wait on the pavement. The argument about Naples' best pizzeria never ends, but this is where it starts.

The oldest working opera house in Europe, older than La Scala, with a red and gold auditorium that daytime guided tours get you inside. A performance is the better experience where the dates allow. Next to the royal palace and the arcade, so it slots into a walk rather than needing a trip of its own.

A small private chapel holding the Veiled Christ — a marble figure under a marble sheet, carved so convincingly that people have insisted for two centuries it must be a trick. Two more veiled sculptures beside it and a genuinely strange basement below. Tiny, timed, and it sells out: book before you reach Naples, not after.

Naples' grand café since 1860, on the corner of Piazza del Plebiscito, with frescoed rooms and a standing bar that is a different price and a better experience. The caffè sospeso — paying for a stranger's coffee — started in places like this.

A blank, pyramid-studded stone front — left over from the palace it used to be — hiding an interior of near-total baroque saturation. The contrast is the whole point and it registers in about a second. On Spaccanapoli, opposite Santa Chiara's tiled cloister.

Naples' answer to Milan's arcade, built a decade later on a similar scale, directly opposite the opera house. Free, roofed, and a useful shortcut in rain. Worth looking up at the glass and down at the zodiac set into the floor, then moving on.

Naples' great civic space, a colonnaded curve facing the royal palace, and one of the few places in the old city with room to breathe. No traffic, concerts in summer, and the point where the tight streets of the centre finally open onto the bay. Ten minutes, usually on the way to something else.