Naples by Appetite

Drop your bags at your hotel in the Centro Storico — being central here means everything is walkable, and you'll want every minute on foot.

Naples invented the rule that espresso is drunk standing at the bar, and Caffè Spaccanapoli on the city's great straight street is the place to submit to it. Pair yours with a sfogliatella — the ridged, shell-shaped pastry whose layers shatter at the first bite — and you have the perfect Neapolitan opening act.

A short walk from Spaccanapoli brings you to one of the most quietly astonishing rooms in Italy. The Cappella Sansevero holds Giacomo Sammartino's Veiled Christ — a marble sculpture so technically improbable it still provokes disbelief. Give yourself an unhurried hour here before the midday crowd arrives.

Since 1870, da Michele has served exactly two pizzas: marinara and margherita. No frills, no extras, no reservations — just a queue, a number, a table, and the most focused wood-fired margherita on the planet. This is ground zero for Neapolitan pizza, and lunch here is as close to a pilgrimage as eating gets.

The Gothic church of San Lorenzo Maggiore is remarkable above ground, but the real draw is what lies beneath: excavations of a Roman macellum — a covered market — with intact streets, bakeries and drainage channels from the first century. Walking them gives the city's appetite for food an unexpectedly ancient dimension.

Naples fries everything — cuoppo of mixed seafood and vegetables, pizza fritta, crocchè di patate — and early evening is the moment to join the street-food ritual before sitting down. Vineria Stuzzicheria makes a natural stop for an aperitivo with snacks, easing you from the afternoon into the night.

End the first day with a proper sit-down dinner at Palazzo Petrucci, a restaurant in the Centro Storico that takes Campanian ingredients seriously — local fish, seasonal vegetables from the volcanic plains around Vesuvius — and treats them with real finesse. A grander note to close an appetite-first day.

A second morning, a second espresso standing at the bar — different café, same religion. Bar Settebello keeps the ritual brisk and the coffee dark. Order a cornetto if you need something to hold the cup company.

Forty metres below street level, a labyrinth of Greek and Roman tunnels, cisterns and wartime air-raid shelters winds under the Centro Storico. La Napoli Sotterranea guides you through the city's underside — cool, damp and completely removed from the noise above — before delivering you back to daylight with a new sense of how many layers Naples actually has.

If da Michele is minimalism, Gino Sorbillo is abundance — a long menu of imaginative toppings on a dough that has made this family name synonymous with the best of Neapolitan pizza. The queue moves, the oven roars and the result justifies every minute of the wait.

Take the funicular up to the Vomero hill and walk to Castel Sant'Elmo, the star-shaped fortress that has watched over the bay since the fourteenth century. The reward for the climb is a 360-degree view that stretches from Vesuvius to Capri — the whole geography of the city laid out below you, sea and streets and rooftops all at once.

Descend back into the city and cross Piazza del Plebiscito, Naples' vast ceremonial square, flanked by the colonnade of San Francesco di Paola and the Royal Palace. There's nothing to buy or book — just space, light off the bay, and the low hum of the city doing what it always does.

A final aperitivo hour at Nilo, named for the Egyptian deity whose ancient statue sits nearby in the street of the same name. It's the kind of bar that belongs to the neighbourhood — unhurried, atmospheric, good for a Negroni and whatever arrives on the snack plate before the last dinner of the trip.

A Neapolitan institution for cucina di mare — pasta with clams, baked fish, the kind of straightforward Campanian cooking that has fed generations of travellers arriving at and departing from the nearby railway station. No better way to close two days spent eating your way through one of Europe's great food cities.