After a very long drive from the north-east of Italy and across the mountains, we arrived in Napoli (Naples) around 4 in the afternoon. One of the first things I did was to step out onto the balcony and take some shots from our hotel room in the highly recommended Palazzo Caracciolo Napoli MGallery on the Via Carbonara.

(I didn't plan out the shots unfortunately, so I monkeyed with the seconds component of the filename to put the frames into a left to right panoramic order.)

In a lot of cases the view from a hotel isn't particularly interesting. But this is Napoli. It's a city which has a history stretching back thousands of years, which has been ruled by dozens of different types of rulers, each of which has left a mark, and where the people are jammed into a relatively small space because of the geography. As a result, there is something to see everywhere you look.

The Via Carbonara runs roughly north-west to south-east. In the north-west direction, all you really see is more city. Although considering what I said in the previous paragraph, there's plenty to see there as well. This shot was taken looking in that direction. (In fact the first shot that I took in this set looked the other way. I changed the order so that you could see the view running from left to right as we are used to doing.) The south-east direction looks towards the active volcano Mount Vesuvius. Not in this brace of shots I grant you, but you'll see it soon.

In most cities there is a clear demarcation between the upmarket and lower market housing. In this case you just need to walk along the street to rapidly move between some fairly rundown and weatherworn buildings, and some which are significantly more recent and better maintained.