‘In Europe,’ wrote Stendhal, ‘there are only two capitals: Paris and Naples’. And for once, he wasn’t all that shy of the truth. Ever since Charles of Anjou seized the Neapolitan throne in the late thirteenth century, the two cities have been bound together so closely that it has sometimes been hard for Frenchmen to believe that there are any others worth bothering about. In 1494, Charles VIII plunged the whole of Italy into war, just so that he could rule Naples for a few months; in 1808, Joachim Murat nearly shed tears of joy when Napoleon made him its king; and since then, no end of writers, artists and musicians have waxed lyrical about its supposedly ‘French’ charms. As the Marquis de Sade famously quipped, nowhere but in Paris and Naples could you find such fearful beauty – or such delightful squalor.
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