San Giorgio a Cremano

They chose their saint as a bodyguard: they wanted one with a fighter's reputation, who would defend them from enemies and from disasters, and tradition has it that Saint George saved them at the end of the tenth century from an eruption of Vesuvius. The Cremano, on the other hand, does not mean cremated by the lava, as has long been repeated: a recent study traces it to the name of an ancient landowner, Cambrianus. Earlier still, this strip was called Foris Flubeum, beyond the river, because the Sebeto separated it from Naples.

In the ninth century the coast between here and Portici was in Saracen hands, and the duke of Naples looked the other way: he had made an alliance with them and had himself paid a levy on their raids. Only in 882 were they driven out, and the reclamation could begin; in 993 a chapel dedicated to Saint George was the town's first nucleus. Today we are on the Miglio d'Oro: the eighteenth-century Vesuvian villas — Villa Bruno above all, now a cultural venue — punctuate the urban fabric, and on the boundary with Portici stands the Pietrarsa railway museum. San Giorgio a Cremano gave Naples and the world Massimo Troisi, born here in 1953: the town remembers him with a national comedy prize and with an affectionate memory that surfaces in the murals. Vesuvius rises behind, and ahead Naples is already an unbroken suburb.