The Real Napoli Behind the Book

(Day 15 of 30 – story crumbs from the world of Loveandpizza.it 🍕)

People sometimes ask me whether the Napoli in Loveandpizza.it is made up.

“Oh, no,” I say. “The Napoli in this novel is gloriously, stubbornly real.”

I didn’t have to invent very much. I simply wrote down a city that was already crazier, louder, funnier, more beautiful and far more extraordinary than anything I could have dreamed up on my own.

Before we set off, though, let me tell you what this post isn’t. It isn’t a page torn from a guidebook, and it isn’t a tidy “locations from the book” list. Because these aren’t just real places that happen to appear in the novel, Oh, no… they’re places where my own Napoli memories became Carolina’s. I lived near them, walked through them, studied, ate, watched and wrote in them… and then, somewhere along the way, I handed them over to Carolina, Lisa, Luca and Fabrizio (who are themselves a mix of people who are part of my life, and people I met during my own year in Napoli).

So today, I’m taking you around some of the real places woven into Loveandpizza.it. No major spoilers 🤐; just a few crumbs from the map.

(Well… perhaps one or two kiss-shaped crumbs. What?? You didn’t think there’d be kissing in a story called Loveandpizza.it?? Tsk, tsk, Dear Reader. 😌)

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The Quartieri Spagnoli, where it all began

The very first pages of Loveandpizza.it were written in the small flat where I lived, right in the heart of the Quartieri Spagnoli. And I have to say that Carolina’s arrival was nothing like a peaceful writing retreat with a mountain view and an expensive candle flickering beside the notebook. She landed in the middle of Napoli, in rather a traumatic way.

Voices travelled between balconies. Scooters squeezed through streets far too narrow to allow it. Washing hung above everyone’s heads, music escaped from open windows, and entire conversations happened at full volume, several floors apart.

The Quartieri didn’t politely wait outside while I wrote. It came straight in, and its streets, its sounds, its families and its hidden corners became part of the story’s very heart. It’s also the corner of Napoli most closely tied to Carolina’s, Lisa’s and Fabrizio’s worlds.

But this neighbourhood deserves far more than a single section. So tomorrow, the Quartieri Spagnoli gets a whole post to itself.

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Via Nazario Sauro: writing beside the sea

I didn’t always stay shut in the flat. Some days, I’d take my notebook down to the waterfront and settle near a little kiosk on Via Nazario Sauro, and write with the whole Bay of Naples in front of me – Vesuvio watching from across the water, the city humming away behind me, and (more often than not) a cold beer and something salty within reach (I used to love the tiny pretzels they served with the beer 😋).

It became one of my favourite places on earth to sit, stare at the sea, and disappear into the story. So, years later, I gave that exact corner to Carolina.

A tiny kiss-shaped spoiler ahead. Although – honestly – this is Loveandpizza.it. You knew there’d be kissing, right?

It’s also where Carolina shares her first kiss with Fabrizio. 😍

And that’s one of the things I love most about writing fiction: a place can belong to you first – carrying your ordinary afternoons and the person you were back then – and then you write a story there, and it starts carrying somebody else’s memories too.

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7 Soldi: the real pizzeria behind the story

Let’s pause for pizza. This is Napoli, after all. 🍕

The pizzeria in Loveandpizza.it was inspired by 7 Soldi, a real pizzeria in the Quartieri Spagnoli, where I ate what I still remember as one of the best Margheritas of my life. I still visit every time I am in Napoli. The place lodged itself in my imagination long after the last bite, and eventually it made its way into the novel.

The pizzeria is real. What happens inside it belongs firmly to the story – and quite a lot happens inside it. 🤫

In the book, it becomes one of those places a story keeps returning to: a meeting point, a refuge, and the backdrop to several moments I am absolutely not going to explain here. (Look at me… Showing restraint. Character growth. 😇) There’s just something about a proper Neapolitan pizzeria – the heat, the noise, the endless coming and going, everyone in everyone else’s business – that gives a scene exactly the closeness, and the pressure, a love story needs. So I borrowed all of it.

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Scaturchio: where I studied Italian, and Carolina… didn’t

In Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, you’ll find Scaturchio: a historic pasticceria that’s graced the piazza for well over a century, famous for classic Neapolitan sweets like sfogliatelle and babà.

It’s also where I used to sit and study Italian. Or try to. There would be a coffee, something sweet, and a page of verb conjugations lying in wait to destroy my confidence – while the whole piazza performed its daily theatre around me. Honestly, I was never only studying the language there; I was studying Napoli: how people greeted one another, how long a single coffee could be made to last, how an ordinary afternoon somehow turned into a show.

Carolina remembers Scaturchio rather differently.

Because Scaturchio is also where Luca kisses her for the first time. Clandestinely.

So, apparently, I sat there wrestling with Italian grammar… while Carolina was given a far more interesting lesson. 😳

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Via Toledo, Piazza Dante and Gesù Nuovo: finding her way

When Carolina first arrives, Napoli isn’t hers yet. It’s too noisy, too crowded, too unpredictable. The streets have their own logic – and so do the people.

And then she starts to walk. From Vomero down towards Piazza Dante, along the sweep of Via Toledo, and into the historic centre. These streets mattered to me because they let me show her bond with the city shifting, little by little: at first she’s just trying not to get lost; then she looks; then she notices; and, eventually, she feels like she belongs.

The Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo, with its extraordinary spiked stone façade, turns up during Carolina and Lisa’s early wanderings too – the church is linked to San Giuseppe Moscati, the Neapolitan doctor and saint, whose story finds its way into their conversation. And Piazza del Gesù Nuovo is where the famous Spaccanapoli begins: the long, dead-straight street that slices right through the old city like a knife through a warm sfogliatella.

And somewhere in that tangle of old streets, in one of the churches of the historic centre, Carolina has an extraordinary encounter of her own one day. But that’s a story for the book.

I never wanted Carolina to fall for Napoli instantly. That would have been far too easy – and not remotely believable after her first impressions. She needed to discover the city in pieces: a piazza, a church, a street, a story, a person. Napoli isn’t really interested in making a good first impression. Sometimes it makes you work for the relationship.

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Vomero and Castel Sant’Elmo: Napoli from above

Early on, Carolina and Lisa ride the funicular up to Vomero and walk to Castel Sant’Elmo, the great fortress on the hill famous for its sweeping views across the city and the bay. And just before they reach it, Carolina eats her first proper Neapolitan Margherita – a relationship that, I’m delighted to report, gets off to a far smoother start than her relationship with Napoli itself.

Then the whole city opens up beneath her. From up there, Napoli looks almost calm: the dense streets tumbling down towards the water, the bay catching the light, and Vesuvio rising across the distance.

For Carolina, though, that view isn’t only beautiful. Vesuvio fascinates her – and unsettles her. She can’t quite fathom how people go about their ordinary lives beneath a volcano as though it were the most normal thing in the world. (The people of Napoli, meanwhile, are presumably wondering why this girl keeps staring at it.)

That moment gave me a way to show two things at once: Carolina falling under the city’s spell, while staying just a little afraid of it. Which, now that I think about it, describes several of her relationships rather well.

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Castel dell’Ovo: the castle protected by an egg

Down by the sea stands Castel dell’Ovo, the Egg Castle.

Napoli could, of course, have named it after a king, a battle, or some grand military triumph. Instead… an egg. And naturally, there’s a legend.

One of the legends says that the Roman poet Virgil – author of the Aeneid – hid an enchanted egg in the castle’s foundations. As long as the egg stays whole, the entire structure will stand on its own and Napoli stays safe. If it ever breaks, disaster follows. Which seems like an entirely reasonable system of civic protection, if you ask me.

The castle sits out on the water with the bay wrapped around it and Vesuvio beyond – one of those spots where Napoli seems to have arranged itself for maximum drama. It belongs in Loveandpizza.it because it’s impossible to separate from the city’s emotional landscape. Napoli is full of history, yes, but it’s just as full of stories. Saints, poets, catacombs, ghosts, miracles, superstitions and magical eggs all live quite happily beside the traffic, and nobody finds the combination the least bit strange. That’s part of the city’s spell.

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Marechiaro: poetry, passion and one unforgettable night

And then there’s Marechiaro.

Marechiaro is a tiny seaside corner of the Posillipo district, all fishing boats and sea air – and home to a famous little window, the fenestrella, immortalised in the Neapolitan song “Marechiare” by the poet Salvatore Di Giacomo. In Loveandpizza.it, though, it carries a story all of its own.

It belongs to one of the most romantic – and decidedly least innocent – sequences in the whole novel. I’m not going to tell you who’s there, or what’s said, or what it changes. But I will tell you it involves a hurried drive across Napoli, a freshly made Margherita, and Umberto Tozzi’s “Gli Innamorati”… and, well. Let’s just say the pizza isn’t the only thing generating heat. 😳

(That song will turn up again when I share the Loveandpizza.it playlist. But I’ll behave myself, and get back to Marechiaro.)

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The city did half the writing

Looking back, I can see that Napoli didn’t just hand Loveandpizza.it a setting. It gave the story its routes, its flavours, its contradictions, well, its whole emotional geography.

I gave Carolina the places where I’d studied, written, wandered and eaten. She filled them with her own first impressions, friendships, mistakes, kisses and discoveries. And now the memories are tangled together for good: Scaturchio belongs to the version of me hunched over an Italian newspaper and a dictionary – and to Carolina and Luca. Via Nazario Sauro belongs to me, my notebook and that view of Vesuvio – and to Carolina and Fabrizio. The Quartieri Spagnoli gave me somewhere to live; later, it gave the story its heart.

That’s why this could never be an ordinary guide to Napoli. I didn’t want to give you a list of dots on a map. I wanted to place in your hand – and stamp on your heart – a map of how a real city became part of a fictional life.

And the truth is, Napoli did half my work for me. All I had to do was pay attention.

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Want to wander it yourself?

If all this has you reaching for your passport (I don’t blame you one bit), here are the real places – the ones in the book, plus a few more corners of this world well worth your time:

• 7 Soldi pizzeria: on Instagram @7soldi1962
• Historic Centre of Naples: UNESCO
• Scaturchio: its story
• Chiesa delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco: read more
• Marechiaro: read more
• Napoli Sotterranea (the ancient city beneath the city): napolisotterranea.org
• Reggia di Caserta: reggiadicaserta.cultura.gov.it
• Pompeii: pompeiisites.org
• Herculaneum (Ercolano): ercolano.cultura.gov.it
• Vesuvio: visitpompeiivesuvius.com
• Capri: capritourism.com

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Tomorrow: inside the Quartieri Spagnoli

Tomorrow, we head straight into the loudest, most gloriously alive corner of the whole city: the Quartieri Spagnoli, the neighbourhood Carolina comes to call home. Those steep little streets more than deserve a post of their own… and who knows what might be waiting around the corner. Faith, mischief, a shrine, a runaway scooter – and the eternal Neapolitan truth that love, like pizza, comes with far too many options. 😉

Until then, tell me:

Have you ever been to Napoli – or is it still on your list? And what’s the one place, anywhere in the world, that holds both a real memory and a story for you? 👇

Dani. x

P.S. Loveandpizza.it is coming back in English, Italian and Portuguese. Save your slice and you’ll be first to know the moment your edition’s ready. 🍕