Music, also, has played a key part in the city's identity: there's long been a Naples style, bound up with the city's strange, harsh dialect - and, to some extent, the long-established presence of the US military: American jazz lent a flavour to Neapolitan traditional songs in the Fifties; and the Seventies saw one of Italy's most concentrated musical movements in the urban blues scene of Pino Daniele and the music around the radical Alfa Romeo factory out at Pomigliano. More recently, a distinctive style of Neapolitan rap emerged from the centri sociali or "social centres" - groups of left-wing urban activists who challenge the establishment. The most famous exponents of this kind of rap are 99 Posse, who joined forces with Bisca to record Guai a Chi ci Tocca ( Trouble for Those who Touch Us ), which documented a brutal police attack on a peaceful student demonstration in Naples in 1994.
Naples is a surprisingly large city, and a sprawling one, with a centre that has many different focuses. The area between Piazza Garibaldi and Via Toledo, roughly corresponding to the old Roman Neapolis (much of which is still unexcavated below the ground), makes up the old part of the city - the centro storico - the main streets still following the path of the old Roman roads. This is much the liveliest, most teeming part of town, an open-air kasbah of hawking, yelling humanity that makes up in energy what it lacks in grace. Buildings rise high on either side of the narrow, crowded streets, cobwebbed with washing; there's little light, not even much sense of the rest of the city outside - certainly not of the proximity of the sea.
But the insularity of the centro storico is deceptive, and in reality there's another, quite different side to Naples, one that's much more like the sunwashed Bay of Naples murals you've seen in cheap restaurants back home. Via Toledo , the main street of the city, edges the old centre from the Palazzo Reale up to the Museo Nazionale Archeologico and the heights of Capodimonte ; to the left rises the Vómero , with its fancy housing and museums, and the smug neighbourhood of Chiaia , beyond which lies the long green boulevard of Riviera de Chiara , stretching around to the districts of Mergellina and Posillipo : all neighbourhoods that exert quite a different kind of pull - that of an airy waterfront city, with views, seafood eaten al fresco and peace and quiet.
