The inner city

Those who understand that the best things in a city are never visible from the outside.

Naples keeps its most beautiful spaces out of sight. Every day, thousands of visitors walk past heavy wooden doors without entering them. Behind those doors, some of the most extraordinary places in southern Europe have been breathing quietly for centuries.

This experience takes you through them.

We meet at Piazza del Gesù, where the diamond-cut stone facade of the church opposite is already a lesson in what this city does: extraordinary beauty, placed somewhere you would only notice if you stopped. From here we walk into the oldest streets of the centro storico.

Our first stop is the Cloister of Santa Chiara, a 14th century monastery courtyard redesigned in the 18th with hand-painted majolica tiles that cover every column and bench with  pastoral scenes in cobalt and yellow. Neapolitan poets and songwriters have been setting their verses here for generations. Standing in the garden, you will understand why.

We continue to Palazzo Venezia, which served for four hundred years as the Embassy of the Republic of Venice in the Kingdom of Naples. At the back of the building, invisible from the street, a hanging garden looks out over the rooftops of the city. We stop here for a coffee.

From here we enter the Cloister of Santi Marcellino e Festo, a vast Renaissance space swallowed by the university and almost never visited by anyone who is not a student. Its scale is quietly astonishing.

We walk on to the Archivio di Stato, housed in the vast former monastery of Santi Severino e Sossio. Here the spaces multiply: three cloisters, each with its own character. The Cloister of the Plane Tree is one of the finest in Naples, with walls covered in stunning 16th-century frescoes.

Then we step into the cloister of San Gregorio Armeno, tucked behind the street famous for its nativity workshops. Most visitors spend an hour on the street without knowing that thirty seconds away there is a garden of orange trees and a fountain that has been running since the sixteenth century.

We end at Palazzo Carafa, where a working artist has opened his studio inside one of the most beautiful Renaissance courtyards in the city.

Groups are limited to twelve people. Always.