The Gulf of Naples has attracted wealthy travelers since the times of ancient Rome, when Tiberius decided to live out his final decade on the island of Capri. In the 1940s and 1950s, Amalfi’s craggy coastline became a haven for artists, actors, and writers including John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, and to say that its popularity has skyrocketed in the last half-century would be an understatement. Yet, up until recently, Naples, the coast’s largest city, was largely treated as a layover—an inconvenient train stop on the way to Amalfi, or the gateway to Capri, Ischia, and other nearby islands.
Stories of organized crime and lax police surveillance have kept travelers at bay since 1975, when the Vele di Scampia, an ambitious urban housing project in the north of the city, was completed and quickly became the de facto headquarters of a burgeoning drug trade. In 1980, the catastrophic Irpinia earthquake killed nearly 3,000 people and left 250,000 homeless, and the Camorra—the Neapolitan Mafia—pocketed $6.4 billion worth of earthquake reparations.
