To the left, across the blue bay, is Vesuvius, sleepy and silent, seemingly no threat at all in the crystalline sunlight. Straight ahead is the isle of Capri, its jagged outlines more sharply defined now that it is early evening. Below me are swimmers taking the day's last dives from the rocks piled around the Castel dell'Ovo.
The setting is the marina on the edge of the royal quarter of Naples and no one who has seen it over the past 120 years would challenge the verdict of the 1884 edition of Cook's tour guide, which called it "perhaps the loveliest spot in Europe".
But hang on a second. Who wrote this? "Naples is an ill-built, ill-paved, ill-lighted, ill-drained, ill-watched, ill-governed and ill-ventilated city . . . " Yes, that same Cook's guide of 1884.
The shelves of a sizeable library could be filled with all the books that have sought to describe and explain the supposed paradoxes at the heart of Naples: rare beauty amid appalling squalor, artistic refinement amid ugly violence, "a paradise inhabited by devils", as the old cliché has it.
Perhaps it is time to cast these preconceptions aside. On my last two trips to Naples over the past 18 months what has struck me most is how the city's alleged "abnormality" lies as much in our imaginations as it does in the reality of Naples itself.
It is not the end of Europe and the start of Africa, as early 19th century travellers from northern European cultures used to maintain. It is not an oddity among Italian cities. It is not "less civilised" than Rome, Florence or Venice. Like Barcelona or Marseilles, it is a great Mediterranean port, with a flavour all its own.
But what about the crime, noise and dirt? Isn't Naples the capital of traffic chaos? It may at first seem so, as you drive in a taxi from the central railway station at Piazza Garibaldi, and motorini riders approach head on at disconcerting speed, swerving at the last second as if in some real-life video game.
But traffic in Naples, at least in and near the centre, is probably better regulated now than at any time in the city's automobile history. Drivers stop at traffic lights. They let pedestrians pass. They do not park anywhere they please. They do not beep their horns for no reason at all.
Of course, there are exceptions. But the general point stands. And speaking as a resident of Rome of more than three years' standing, I find all this a refreshing change from the tiresome anarchy of driving around the Italian capital.
Naples, moreover, boasts an efficient and expanding public transport system: a brand new metro service and new bus routes, as well as the familiar old trams. The city's white taxis have their prices on prominent display inside - there is no need to be ripped off. For anyone who knew the Naples of the 1970s or 1980s, the improvements are unmistakeable.
It would be pointless to pretend that the plagues of organised crime and of other social ills, such as unemployment and a dilapidated housing stock, have gone away. In the entire Campania region, which includes Naples, the official jobless rate is about 20 per cent, and almost 60 per cent among 15- to 24-year-olds. Clearly, the real rate is lower: thousands of people are busy working for unregistered small businesses, often making cheap or counterfeit clothes and accessories.
But others are sucked into petty crime or more nefarious activities. From January 2004 to last August, a feud among rival camorra gangs has resulted in about 140 killings, some matching all too well a certain traditional image of Naples: a customer shot dead in a restaurant and slumping head first in his pizza; a woman murdered and stuffed in the boot of a car that was set ablaze.
These incidents suggest how much is at stake for the Neapolitan mafia. The drug trade brings in an annual €15bn for the camorra, according to city prosecutors. Organised crime also has its tentacles in everything from construction and waste disposal to banking and high-street retailers.
But it is to the credit of the municipal authorities in Naples that they have not allowed this blight to derail their efforts to continue the renaissance of the city that began in earnest in 1993. It was then that Antonio Bassolino, a centre-left politician, took over as mayor, serving for almost seven years before he moved up to become the governor of the Campania region.
The showpiece of Mr Bassolino's clean-up was the restoration of Piazza del Plebiscito, the grand square next to the royal palace and the adjoining San Carlo opera house. Once an unsightly and intimidating imbroglio of thieves and desperadoes, the square is now peaceful, clean and traffic-free.
At cafés and restaurants just beyond the northern side of the square and extending into Via Toledo and the adjacent Quartieri Spagnoli, the hilly, crowded old Spanish district, one can sit in the shade and watch the urban bustle just as in any other Mediterranean city. The temptation to sample the punchy richness of a Lacryma Christi red - the "Tears of Christ" wine that is grown on the slopes of Vesuvius - is hard to resist.
Under Mr Bassolino and Rosa Russo Jervolino, his successor as mayor, Naples has made steady progress in restoring and reopening its museums, palaces and churches. To pick just one example: at the Castel Nuovo, the medieval castle rebuilt after the Aragonese conquest of 1442, a glass floor allows you to inspect a small but fascinating collection of skeletons that were recently found buried in neat graves laid out below the castle's foundations.
After taking a lift to the top of the Castel Nuovo, you gain a panoramic view of the city that gives an idea not just of its sheer size but of how the new public transport network is making it easier to travel around.
Boarding the train back to Rome, I am left with the feeling that, particularly since the mid-19th century, Naples has had a raw deal from foreign commentators - and these include not a few northern Italians. It was William Gladstone, the British prime minister, who, after the suppression of the Naples popular uprising of 1848, called the Neapolitan regime "the negation of God erected into a system of government".
Later, after Italy's unification in 1860, Massimo d'Azeglio, the Piedmontese statesman and author, suggested that to merge northern Italy with the Neapolitan kingdom had been "like going to bed with someone who has smallpox".
Such stereotypes can and ought to be discarded. In these early years of the 21st century, is it too much to suggest that Naples may be the coming city of Italy?
Tony Barber is the FT's Rome correspondent
Contrary and capricious city
I went to Naples expecting pizza, ice cream, Pompeii and the ferry to Capri, writes Carolyn Lyons. But Naples is a contrary and capricious city. It always gives you more than you anticipate but never what you expect.
Naples is situated on one of the most breathtaking bays in the world but it is possible to be there for days and never see the sea, let alone Vesuvius. The city is a working port and densely packed. There is none of Florence or Siena’s perfect beauty. Instead, there is a carnival of humanity spilling from the towering tenements, with their lines of drying washing, and thronging the medieval streets.
Stroll through the city centre and, out of the corner of your eye, you’ll spot people lowering baskets out of their windows to haul up the morning’s groceries.
A visit to Naples consists of a series of different experiences and discoveries - an image built up slowly, bit by bit, like the city itself, since Naples, rather than demolishing its older versions, was constructed in layers, one on top of another. In the courtyard of the church of San Lorenzo Maggiore on Via Tribunali steps lead down to subterranean excavations. It is magical to stand on a Roman street on top of a Greek one, paved with piperno - the same dark volcanic rock that covers Neapolitan streets today. When I went, I was there alone, just me and the ghosts of ordinary people doing ordinary things down through the millennia.
Santa Chiara, a nearby church, was bombed flat during the second world war (it’s since been rebuilt) but its lovely majolica cloister amazingly survived and is one of the few peaceful places in central Naples. It’s a unique masterpiece with intricate, multicoloured tiling. I was fascinated to find a side room filled from floor to ceiling with a huge antique presepe, the Neapolitan Christmas crèche. At its top, under elegant flying angels, lies baby Jesus with the usual nativity characters but below, spiralling down like lava, is all of 18th century Neapolitan life in miniature.
Presepe are the essence and vitality of Naples, as much now as then, and the art of making them remains at the core of Neapolitan popular culture. The Via San Gregorio Armeno has nothing but presepe model shops and this scaled-down world overlaps with that of religious kitsch in general, of course. For fans of the latter, Raffaele Russo’s shop on Via S. Biagio dei Librai is the world headquarters.
In Naples, sometimes I need a respite, either by venturing underground or by finding a peaceful spot - another oasis of calm in the frenetic Centro Storico is the tiny Piazza Bellini, with its literaryÂÂflavoured café, Intra Moenia - or by going behind the scenes.
As much as they love light and colour, Neapolitans are obsessed with death. That’s why Capella Sansevero says so much about the spirit of the city. It’s an 18th century funeral chapel planned by Raimondo de Sangro, prince, inventor, alchemist, Masonic grand master and Neapolitan par excellence. At its centre is a sculpture by Giuseppe Sammartino of the dead Christ shrouded in a veil that is so exquisite and transparent that no one knows how such a fine veil could be carved out of marble. The prince’s gruesome anatomical machines in the basement are impressive in a different way.
History, mortality and a baroque and sometimes macabre religiosity are all part of modern-day Naples. Three times a year, rich and poor, civic leaders and street urchins alike, cram into the 17th century duomo to watch Saint Gennaro’s blood liquefy in its phial, thus ensuring Naples’s survival. The last time the blood failed to liquefy, Naples survived physically but the home football team were relegated - almost as apocalyptic an event for a Neapolitan.
Caravaggio, who spent his last year on the run in Naples (another very Neapolitan thing to do), painted one of the most outlandish of his altarpieces for the church of Pio Monte della Misericordia on Via Tribunali. I love his extraordinary “Seven Acts of Mercy”, in which he weaves all of them into one incredible whole.
In spite of recent improvements, Naples is not Paris or Frankfurt or even Rome. Things don’t always work the way they should. There’s a new metro but streets still fill with rotting garbage. Pedestrian-only roads are choked with scooters. Crucial exhibits vanish or are closed off in the museums; or whole museums can be shut when they are supposed to be open. Of the four main museums in Naples - Certosa di San Martino (antique presepe; great view of the bay), Capodimonte (main art gallery), Palazzo Reale (Versailles-style decoration) - my favourite is the National Archaeological Museum. Here is where all the main treasures found at Pompeii and Herculaneum ended up.
There are acres of enormous monumental statues but upstairs are the delicate mosaics; my favourite is square and black and shows the fish of the Mediterranean. Before you go into the museum proper, book a (free) slot to see the “Secret Cabinet”, which has the erotic frescoes from Pompeii and see if you find them, as I do, more touching than titillating.
The one thing everyone knows about Naples is that it invented pizza. Unsurprisingly, pizza is everywhere and everybody has his or her own favourite place. Mine is Da Michele on via Cesare Sersale. You take a number and wait in the street for a table in the shop, with its pristine green-and-white tiles and outsized pizzas - but only two types.
Then there are the friggitorie, for the original fried fast food. Naples has friggitorie the way UK cities have sandwich bars. They can be noisy and crowded at lunchtime but well worth the effort to penetrate.
Weekends are tricky in Naples, with many shops shutting by midday on Saturday and not reopening until Monday - which happens to be the day many museums close. Petty crime is still a problem with pickpockets on overcrowded buses.
Naples is a desperately poor city, with a history of ruthless exploitation by outside powers, that is struggling to modernise but, by the same token, it’s not just another identikit “Eurobreak” destination. Naples has kept its distinctive, individual flavour, like a shot of its famous coffee taken zuccerato, the strongest and sweetest in Italy.
