Italy Guide
Campania
Piazza Garibaldi
However you get to Naples, there's a good chance that the first place you'll see is Piazza Garibaldi, a long, wide square crisscrossed by traffic lanes, that cuts into the city centre from the modern train station. It's the city's transport hub – most of the city buses leave from here, as do the metropolitana and Circumvesuviana lines – and one of its most hectic junctions; indeed it's Piazza Garibaldi, perhaps more so than any other part of the city, that puts people off Naples.
Off the far right corner of the square, the Porta Capuana is one of several relics from the Aragonese city walls, a sturdy defensive gate dating from 1490, delicately decorated on one side in Florentine Renaissance style. Across the road, the white and much renovated Castel Capuano was the residence of the Norman king William I, and later, under the Spanish, became a courthouse – which it still is.