Giugliano in Campania

Between Naples and the Domitian coast, Giugliano is the most populous comune in Italy that is not a provincial capital, and the only one of them above a hundred thousand inhabitants: a real city, grown among the citrus groves and the fields of the Campanian plain. Here Giambattista Basile was governor, and here he died in 1632 — the author of «Lo cunto de li cunti», the collection that gave Europe Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty before Perrault and the Grimms: which is why they call it the city of the fairy tale.

Inside the municipal territory there is also Liternum, a Roman colony founded in 194 before Christ by the lake of Patria: here Scipio Africanus, the man who beat Hannibal at Zama, retired into voluntary exile and died in 183. And a short way off, since 2012, there is something nobody expects: the Allied Joint Force Command Naples, one of NATO's two strategic operational commands in Europe. All around, the coastal strip of Varcaturo and the farmland of friarielli and annurca apples; Naples, the Campi Flegrei and the coast are all half an hour away.