Naples

Naples is a city where it's never too late. In this raw, authentic southern Italian town you may have to pop twenty cents into a slot to get an elevator to work. You might see a Fiat 500 chained by its bumper bar to a pole with do-it-yourself security ingenuity. Or a baker kneading dough with his hands rather than an industrial mixer. You will see women on their knees praying to the skulls of the unknown and buckets lowered from balconies to save delivery trips up steep flights of stairs.

There is no artifice in Naples; no fake, one-dimensional picture-postcard representation of age-old traditions specially crafted for tourists on the hunt for the real Italy. Naples is the real Italy. From the peeling façades of its dilapidated medieval, Renaissance and baroque architecture to the practised customs of long-gone generations to hand-me-down recipes and old-fashioned family values, Naples is not a tourist trap. Here you can still catch the genuine heart and soul of Italy. In this city, you're still on time.

Naples is the capital of the region of Campania and lies between two volcanic areas: Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, in the Gulf of Naples on the west coast of Italy. It is home to about one million people and was founded as Parthenope in around the ninth century BC as a Greek colony. Later, its name was changed to Neapolis, which means New City in Greek. It's one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, a world heritage site, and lays claim to having the largest historical centre of any city in Europe. It is close to the Roman ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum and fronted by an archipelago of three gorgeous islands: Ischia, Capri and Procida.