Royal Palace of Naples

This palace was built for a king who never showed up. In 1600, the Spanish viceroy ordered architect Domenico Fontana to construct a grand royal residence because King Philip III of Spain was rumored to be visiting Naples. Philip never came, but the palace got built anyway, and over the next 260 years four different royal dynasties lived here — Spanish, Austrian, Bourbon, and Savoy — each leaving their mark on the interior like geological layers of monarchical taste.

The grand staircase, added by Francesco Antonio Picchiatti in the mid-17th century, was described by Montesquieu in 1729 as the finest in Europe. The Royal Apartments on the first floor are a dizzying progression of frescoed ceilings, gilded furniture, and Flemish tapestries. The Throne Room still has its original Bourbon furnishings, and the Court Theatre — a tiny jewel-box theater built in 1768 — is decorated with papier-mache figures so lifelike they look like an audience frozen in time.

In 1860, Garibaldi marched in and handed the palace to the new Kingdom of Italy, ending centuries of royal occupation. Today it houses the National Library, which holds the Herculaneum papyri — ancient scrolls carbonized by Vesuvius in 79 AD and painstakingly unrolled over the centuries, one of the most important collections of ancient texts in existence.

The facade along Piazza del Plebiscito features eight niches containing statues of the dynasties that ruled Naples, added in 1888. It's a remarkably honest piece of public art: instead of pretending Naples had one continuous royal story, the city literally lined up its conquerors in a row, as if to say, "Look how many people wanted to own us."