Portici

The name comes from the porticoes of Herculaneum, ruins left showing after the eruption of 79 AD; in the old documents the town was Porticus ad castanetum, Portici by the chestnut wood, because until the fifteenth century there was nothing here but chestnut and oak forest, pasture and the hunting of deer and boar. On 3 October 1839 Italy's first train left Naples and arrived here: the Naples-Portici line opened the Italian railway age, and the national museum of Pietrarsa — in the Bourbon workshops on the boundary — tells the story with period locomotives facing the sea.

The reason for the track was the royal palace: the residence Charles of Bourbon built for himself in 1738 at the foot of Vesuvius, turned after unification into a botanical garden and a higher school of agriculture, and today part of the university. The town had been razed by the eruption of 1631 and rebuilt, and in 1944 the volcano's last awakening buried it under ash: it lies entirely inside the red zone of Vesuvius. In four and a half square kilometres Portici is the second most densely populated comune in Italy after Casavatore, lively and unvarnished: the Granatello, the little Bourbon harbour, lays out fried food and sunsets over the bay.