Where to stay in Naples

This is the half of the centre most people mean when they say they want to stay in Naples. Via Toledo runs through the middle of it, with Line 1 at Toledo, Dante and Università, and Piazza del Gesù, San Domenico Maggiore and the Cappella Sansevero are all a few minutes on foot. Walk east and you are on Spaccanapoli; walk south and you are at Piazza Municipio and the ferries in fifteen minutes.

The Quartieri Spagnoli are the grid of lanes climbing west off Via Toledo. They are 16th-century barracks streets, four storeys of washing lines and scooters, and they are now full of rooms because they are the cheapest thing this close to everything. The busy lanes with the restaurants and the Maradona mural stay busy late. Three turns further up, they do not, and that is the part the safety advice is about.

The far end of the zone is a different proposition again. Around Piazza Mercato and Porta Nolana the buildings are the same age and the street is a market by day and empty at night. Porta Nolana is where the Circumvesuviana leaves for Pompeii and Sorrento, which is the one reason to book down there.

The real cost of this zone is sleep. Scooters use the alleys as through routes, deliveries start early, and single glazing is normal. Ask what the room faces before you book, not after.

One zone, three different places. San Ferdinando is the old royal centre - Piazza del Plebiscito, the Palazzo Reale, Teatro San Carlo, the Galleria Umberto I and Castel Nuovo - and it runs down to Molo Beverello, where the boats to Capri, Ischia and Procida leave. Santa Lucia is the seafront under Castel dell'Ovo, which is where most of the four-star hotels are. Chiaia is the shopping and eating district behind Villa Comunale, and it is where Neapolitans with money live.

What you buy here is calm and a view. The seafront road is closed to traffic, so Via Caracciolo and Via Partenope are a two-kilometre promenade rather than a road, busy with people running and eating until late. It is the part of central Naples where nothing about the street asks you to pay attention.

What you pay is the highest rates in the city and a walk. The centro storico is 25 minutes on foot from Piazza dei Martiri, or two stops on Line 1, and the difference in character over that distance is total. Chiaia closes earlier and quieter than the centre, which is either the point or the problem.

Posillipo is also in this zone and is not the same offer. It is the headland west of Mergellina: villas, sea views, a protected marine park at Gaiola - and five kilometres from the old town with buses and taxis as the only way back. Book it for the view, on a second visit, ideally with a car.

The zone runs east from San Gregorio Armeno and the Duomo, across Via Duomo and Corso Umberto, to Piazza Garibaldi, the Centro Direzionale towers and Poggioreale. Two different bookings live inside one boundary.

The western end is the decumanus maggiore: Via dei Tribunali, the cathedral, the churches, Napoli Sotterranea and the pizzerias people queue outside for an hour. Ten minutes on foot to Piazza del Gesù, fifteen to the archaeological museum. It is as central as Naples gets and the rooms are cheaper than on the Toledo side, because the streets are narrower, darker and less swept.

The eastern end is the station. Everything leaves from here - Rome and Salerno by Trenitalia, Pompeii and Sorrento by Circumvesuviana, the airport by Alibus in about twenty minutes - and the hotels around the square price themselves accordingly. Piazza Garibaldi itself is under long-running construction and is not a place to stand about at night. Read the address, not the district name: 300 metres decides whether you are next to the Duomo or next to the bus terminal.

Vomero is the planned district on the hill: straight streets, plane trees, Piazza Vanvitelli in the middle, and Castel Sant'Elmo and the Certosa di San Martino on the lip above the city. It is where Neapolitan families live who could afford to leave the centre, and it feels like it. Arenella, further north, is the same idea with fewer shops and a longer trip.

Getting down is easy and constant. Line 1 runs from Vanvitelli to Dante in a few minutes, and three separate funiculars drop to Via Toledo, Chiaia and Montesanto. Getting home late is the catch: the funiculars stop in the evening and the metro is not a night service, so the end of a long dinner in the old town is a taxi up the hill.

Book here for a family, a long stay, or a second visit. You get quiet nights, supermarkets rather than souvenir shops, safe streets and rates below Chiaia. You do not get Naples on your doorstep, and on a three-day trip the twenty minutes each way in both directions is a real share of the holiday.

The Rione Sanità sits in a hollow north of the archaeological museum, cut off from the centre in 1809, when Murat's road to Capodimonte was carried over it on a bridge. That accident is the whole character of the district: you go down into it, and it has been left to itself ever since. What is down there is the Palazzo dello Spagnolo staircase, the San Gennaro and San Gaudioso catacombs, the Fontanelle ossuary and a food scene locals rate above anything on Spaccanapoli.

Above it, the hill climbs to Capodimonte - the Bourbon palace with the Farnese collection, in 130 hectares of park. Getting up there is a bus, which in Naples is not a plan you build a day around.

The money argument is real. Rooms here run well below the centre for the same standard, and Museo on Line 1 is at the southern edge, twenty minutes' walk from Piazza del Gesù. The rest of the zone has no metro, and the catch is the return trip: everything is a climb at the end of the day, the lighting thins out quickly, and the streets empty early. This is a district that rewards a second visit to Naples and punishes a first one.

Fuorigrotta is behind Posillipo hill, which is why it exists as a separate place: post-war blocks, wide roads, the Stadio Maradona, the Mostra d'Oltremare exhibition grounds and about 70,000 residents who have no particular reason to go into the centre. Bagnoli, further west, is the site of the Italsider steelworks that closed in 1993 and is still being cleaned up, with Città della Scienza, a pier and summer beach clubs on the shore.

People book here because it is cheap and the map makes it look like Naples. The connections are genuinely fine in daylight - Line 6 to Municipio, Line 2 to Piazza Garibaldi, the Cumana to Montesanto - but every one of them takes twenty minutes or more and there is nothing at this end worth the return trip. On a match day, add 50,000 people to the same trains.

The honest case for booking here is narrow: a trade fair at the Mostra d'Oltremare, a Napoli match, a car you need to park, or a beach day at Bagnoli. For a first visit to Naples, this is the zone people wish they had not saved money on.