Here is one of the first shots that I took from our hotel room. Now you may well think from this that we were in a rundown part of town. However nothing could be further from the truth. And nothing could be closer to the truth. For as I have mentioned in captions to other shots of Napoli, this is a city unlike most others where there are no real "good areas" and "bad areas", but rather you will move from one to the other as you walk along a street. Naples is a bizarre mixture of rich and poor, old and new, safe and dangerous. The hotel that we were staying at has a name which includes the word Palazzo (Palace) and, indeed it was. And is.

Yet this is the state of a building just across the road from us which is clearly long overdue for some shutter replacements and a repaint. Rundown it may be, but there is still a neatness and orderliness that you won't necessarily find in similarly rundown places in other parts of the world. These are still people's homes, and I suspect they still take some pride in them.

I'm not sure that I'd want to live there, but I'm very happy to have visited there albeit too briefly.