Three Days in Napoli, Eating Only Pizza

Getting your bearings

Napoli looks chaotic on a map and makes complete sense on foot. The old city is a grid laid down by the Greeks, which means the tangle you are looking at is actually three long straight streets with everything else hanging off them. Spaccanapoli is the famous one — a dead-straight line that cuts the historic centre in half, so narrow in places that the laundry strung overhead nearly meets in the middle.

North of that you have the university quarter and the archaeological museum. West, up the hill, are the Quartieri Spagnoli: steep, dense, wall-to-wall scooters, and much friendlier than its reputation. South and along the water is Chiaia, which is where the money lives and where you go when you want a quiet dinner and a wide pavement.

I would stay in or just off the Centro Storico for a first visit. It is loud and you will hear scooters at two in the morning, but everything worth walking to is inside twenty minutes, and the point of the city is the street life you are standing in the middle of.

The pizza, properly

Neapolitan pizza is a protected style with actual rules: a soft, wet dough left to rise for a long time, stretched by hand, cooked in about ninety seconds in a wood oven hot enough to hurt. The result is not crisp. The centre is soupy and folds under its own weight, and if you are expecting the structural crunch of a Roman or New York slice you will think the first one is undercooked. It is not. That is the dish.

There are two orders that matter. The marinara is tomato, oregano, garlic, oil — no cheese, nothing to hide behind. The margherita adds fior di latte and basil. Order the marinara first at any new place: if they can make that taste like something, everything else on the menu will be good, and if they cannot, leave and go four streets over.

The other thing nobody tells you is to eat early. Not fashionably early — actually early, when the oven has just come up to temperature and the first doughs of the service go in. The difference between the first pizza of the evening and the fortieth is not subtle, and the queue at seven is a third of the queue at nine.

A great pizza is still under ten euros. This is the single best food-to-money ratio I have found anywhere, and it is the reason I could eat eleven of them without thinking about it.

The half of the food that isn’t pizza

You will want a break by day two, and Napoli is ready for it. The friggitorie — fry shops, usually a window and a fryer and a queue — sell cuoppo, a paper cone of fried things: courgette flowers, potato croquettes, tiny fish, arancini. It costs about four euros and it is the best lunch in the city.

For breakfast, sfogliatella. The riccia is the crisp fan-shaped one that shatters everywhere; the frolla is a soft shortcrust shell. Both are filled with sweetened ricotta and semolina and both are best within an hour of coming out of the oven, which is not a hardship in a city where every third door is a pastry shop.

Coffee is taken standing at the bar, in about ninety seconds, and it is roasted darker and pulled shorter than anywhere else in Italy. It is also about a euro. Do not sit down unless you want to pay three times as much for the privilege, and do not order anything milky after eleven in the morning unless you enjoy being quietly judged.

If you want one proper sit-down meal, make it a ragù — the Neapolitan version is not a mince sauce but whole cuts of meat cooked down for the better part of a day until the sauce is nearly black. It is a Sunday dish, so look for it at lunch on a Sunday.

Pompeii, and whether it’s worth the day

Yes, but do it properly. The Circumvesuviana from Napoli Garibaldi takes about forty minutes and costs a few euros. It is not a nice train. Go early — the site opens at nine and by noon there is no shade, no breeze, and a great many tour groups moving as one organism.

Pompeii is enormous, and the mistake is trying to see all of it. Pick four or five things — the forum, the amphitheatre, a couple of the painted houses, the bath complex — and walk between them slowly rather than route-marching the perimeter. Bring water and a hat; there is very little cover and the stones hold the heat.

One tip that improved the whole day: go to the archaeological museum in Napoli either before or after. Almost everything portable was removed from the site and is in that museum — the mosaics, the frescoes, the household objects. Seeing the empty rooms and then the things that filled them, in either order, turns two half-experiences into one whole one.

What I’d tell someone going next week

Walk everywhere and accept that crossing the road works differently here. You step out at a steady pace, you do not stop, and the traffic moves around you. Hesitating in the middle is the only genuinely dangerous thing you can do. It takes about a day to stop flinching.

Almost nothing is open between roughly three and seven. Plan the afternoon around that rather than fighting it — that is the window for the museum, or a long walk along the water at Chiaia, or lying down, which is what the city is doing.

Book exactly one dinner, on the last night, somewhere that takes reservations. Leave the other five meals entirely to chance and to whatever you walk past. Three days was right. Four would have been one pizza too many, and I say that as someone who does not believe that sentence is normally possible.