Novel set on AGISTRI, Greece
Ten great books set in NAPLES
10th October 2022
Ten great books set in Naples – a city that will give you a true taste of Italy, thanks to its winding cobblestone streets, authentic pizza and real Italian flavour. The historic centre is a UNESCO world heritage site with three enormous castles, a royal palace and many splendid churches and cathedrals.
‘Dicette ‘o pappecio ‘n faccia ‘a noce: damme ‘o tiempo ca te spertos o’ — this is one of the most iconic Neapolitan expressions, literally meaning ‘The worm said to the walnut tree, give me time so I can burrow into you.’ Be patient with me…
Ten of our favourite books set in the city
Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
The fourth and final book of the internationally renowned and bestselling Neapolitan novels
One of the major publishing events of 2015, this dazzling saga of two women – the brilliant Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila – firmly establishes the Neapolitan Quartet as perhaps the most significant work to date of the 21st century. Life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses suffered. But, throughout it all, their friendship remains the gravitational centre of their lives. The unmissable finale to a great literary achievement.
The Temptation to Be Happy by Lorenzo Marone
Cesare is a seventy-seven-year-old widower and cynical troublemaker. He has lived his whole life by his own rules and has no intention of changing now. Aside from an intermittent fling with a nurse called Rossana, he spends his days avoiding the old cat lady next door and screening calls from his children.
But when the enigmatic Emma moves in next door with her strange and sinister husband, Cesare suspects there is more to their relationship than meets the eye. He enlists the other residents to help him investigate and soon discovers a new and unexpected sense of purpose that leads him to risk everything for a future he had never thought possible.
Laced with humour and pathos in equal measure, this is a delightful book to savour, for young and old alike.
Darkness for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Maurizio de Giovanni
The second title in de Giovanni’s new series set in contemporary Naples.
A child is kidnapped. A high-class apartment is burgled. The two crimes seem to have no connection at all until Inspector Lojacono, known as ‘the Chinaman’, starts to investigate. De Giovanni is one of the most dexterous and successful writers of crime fiction currently working in Italy. His award winning and bestselling novels, all set in Naples, offer a brilliant vision of the criminal underworld and the police that battle it in Europe s most fabled, atmospheric, dangerous, and lustful city.
The Bastards of Pizzofalcone is a new series set in contemporary Naples that draws inspiration from Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels and features a large cast of cops doing battle with ruthless criminals, as well as their own demons.
Footprints in the Ash by Stanley Salmons
On mountain slopes south of Pompeii a group of Roman citizens flees the doomed city, leaving their footprints in a layer of volcanic ash. Two thousand years later the footprints are rediscovered, and a joint Anglo-Italian dig is set up. Just when the project is making progress, eminent Oxford archaeologist Professor Julian Lockhart vanishes mysteriously. English detectives Nick Roberts and Lucia Fabri go out to assist the Italian police with the investigation, unaware of the sinister forces – both human and natural – that lie in wait for them. Their subsequent race for survival sweeps them up in an eerie re-enactment of historical events.
Lost in the Spanish Quarter by Heddi Goodrich
Told with intimacy and ferocity and set in the passionate and crumbling Spanish Quarter of Naples, comes a poignant tale of first love – of a place, of a person – where languages and cultures collide while dreams soar and crash in spectacular ways.
‘Don’t forgive me, don’t answer, don’t be sad. Be happy, have babies, make mixed tapes, take pictures … it’s how I always love to think of you. And now and then, if you can and if you want to, remember me.’
Several years after leaving Naples, Heddi receives an email from Pietro, her first love, admitting that he was wrong. Immediately, Heddi is transported back to her college days in that heartbreakingly beautiful city built on ruins and set against the cliffs of a sleeping volcano. Just the thought of the Spanish Quarter, the crumbling apartment she shared with friends and where she first met Pietro, still spark the pain of longing and a desire to belong. For Heddi’s tribe of university friends, Naples was the first taste of freedom and an escape from their familial obligations. But for Heddi it is the place where she searched for the roots she never had, while Pietro tried to escape his. For all of them Naples is a place that they’ll never forget: the setting of their unrestrained youth.
The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper
An engaging, female-focussed novel set in ancient Pompeii, from an exciting new voice in historical fiction.
The streets of Pompeii have a life of their own: the cries of the hawkers, the beauty and dirt of the crowds, the shifts in mood from delight to danger. These are the streets that have become Amara’s home. Day after day she must walk them, looking for business to bring back to her master’s house: the Wolf Den, Pompeii’s infamous brothel.
The realities of her existence are made bearable by the other she-wolves at the Wolf Den. Together they can gossip, offer comfort and dream; and their dreams, when woven together, create a picture of life that makes Amara catch her breath.
They may only be dreams for now, as insubstantial as the candle smoke that follows the flame, but Amara is determined to make them burn bright. She is only a slave in this beginning, but all good stories must start somewhere…
Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano
Published to coincide with the eponymous blockbuster film, Roberto Saviano’s groundbreaking and utterly compelling book is a major international bestseller and has to date sold 750,000 copies in Italy alone. Since publishing his searing expose of their criminal activities, the author has received so many death threats from the Camorra that he has been assigned police protection. Known by insiders as ‘the System’, the Camorra, an organized crime network with a global reach and large stakes in construction, high fashion, illicit drugs and toxic-waste disposal, exerts a malign grip on cities and villages along the Neapolitan coast is the deciding factor in why Campania has the highest murder rate in all of Europe and why cancer levels there have skyrocketed in recent years.
In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer and on a construction site, both controlled by ‘the System’, and as a waiter at a Camorra wedding. Born in Naples, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to help an eighteen-year-old victim, left for dead in the street.
Gomorrah is both a bold and engrossing piece of investigative writing and one heroic young man’s impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organisation.
Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard
Pompeii explodes a number of myths – from the very date of the eruption, probably a few months later than usually thought: the hygiene of the baths which must have been hotbeds of germs: and the legendary number of brothels, most likely only one, to the massive death count which was probably less than ten per cent of the population. Street Life, Earning a Living: Baker, Banker and Garum Maker (who ran the city), The Pleasure of the Body: Food, Wine, Sex and Baths, these chapter headings give a surprising insight into the workings of a Roman town. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica. A fast-food joint on the Via dell’ Abbondanza introduces food and drink and diets and street life. These are just a few of the strands that make up an extraordinary and involving portrait of an ancient town, its life and its continuing re-discovery, by Britain’s leading classicist.
The Collaborator by Gerald Seymour
Deadlier than the Mafia, the Camorra never forget, and never forgive.
She is an Italian accountancy student in London, and her boyfriend Eddie teaches at a language school. But the prime reason Immacolata Borelli came to Britain was to look after her gangster brother, wanted for multiple murders back home in Naples.
For the Borelli clan are major players in the Camorra, a crime network more close-knit and ruthless than the Sicilian Mafia.
Mario Castrolami is a senior Carabinieri investigator of the Camorra, his career dedicated to destroying the corruption and violence of the clans. When Immacolata calls from London to say she is prepared to collaborate with justice – to betray her own family – he knows she is setting in motion a terrifying and unpredictable series of events.
The Borellis will not lose their criminal empire without a vicious fight. They will use anything and anyone to prevent her from giving evidence against them. Even Eddie, and Eddie’s life.
I Will Have Vengeance by Maurizio de Giovanni
Naples, March 1931: a bitter wind stalks the city s streets, and murder lies at its chilled heart. As one of the world s greatest tenors, Maestro Vezzi, is found brutally murdered in his dressing room at Naples famous San Carlo Theatre, the enigmatic and aloof Commissario Ricciardi is called in to investigate. Arrogant and bad-tempered, Vezzi was hated by many, but with the livelihoods of the opera at stake, who would have committed this callous act? Ricciardi, along with his loyal colleague, Maione, is determined to discover the truth. But Ricciardi carries his own secret: will it help him solve this murder?
We hope you enjoy our selection of great books set in Naples! If we have missed any, please add them in the Comments below.
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Surely the best book on Naples is Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis who arrived in war-torn Naples with its starving population, as an Intelligence officer in 1944. He fell in love with the city and the country and wrote, “Were I given the chance to be born again, Italy would be the country of my choice”. It was written a long time ago, but lovers of Naples will recognise the people who inhabit it as they so resemble those who live and earn their living there today. Not to be missed.
1 Comment
Great addition for sure. Thank you for stopping by