In reply to a question from someone not sure whether to visit Florence or Naples, north and south of Rome, respectively:
These are totally different places. One of them historically a republic of wealthy men who cut off each other's heads at times to put on spikes in a piazza to which sweet tourists now go to ogle a famous nude guy. A bunch who over a couple of centuries assembled literature from near and beyond the approved world so that as a place of maybe 40000 or so they succeeded in upturning how people thought about the world though mainly it's the art people go to see. A town where when his Medici boss went out of power, Nick Machiavelli went 30km home to wife and farm, fed the chickens in the morning, drank in the pub in the afternoon and in the evening put on his courtier gear and by candlelight wrote the most influential book on politics for the next 500 years. Which he took back to show the boss when the boss got to be powerful again and the boss said ho hum. A modern city run by the Communist Party in the postwar period, and since the Party went away by its approximately successor the Democratic Party.
Whereas Naples. A huge still somewhat Greek city which survived when Pompeii buried. Curiously tourists whip past Naples to go to see the entombed. Some find Naples uncomfortable because it's not pristine like say Toronto might be or Green Lake Seattle is. Others love it. You could spend weeks there and be discovering more enthralments. For centuries ruled by foreign kings taxing southern Italy to death, it was by 1800 the biggest and richest city in Europe. With some foibles.
…blogspot.com.au/2011/…The unification of Italy took away the taxation power and there have been tough times but it's a jewel of multicultural life and glorious history.
https://youtu.be/pIrKADAY0CA
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