Piazza del Plebiscito

For most of its history, this enormous piazza was a car park. Seriously. One of the grandest public squares in Europe spent decades as a chaotic parking lot until the city finally pedestrianized it in 1994 for the G7 summit. Neapolitans, who had grown up thinking of it as a traffic nightmare, suddenly rediscovered an astonishing civic space that rivals St. Peter's Square in scale.

The semicircular colonnade of the Basilica of San Francesco di Paola dominates the western side, and it's no accident that it looks like a miniature Pantheon — that was exactly the intention. Ferdinand I commissioned it in 1816 as a thanksgiving for getting his throne back after Napoleon's brother-in-law Joachim Murat was executed and Bourbon rule was restored. The message was clear: the old order is back, and it brought columns. Construction dragged on until 1846, but the result is genuinely magnificent — 38 Ionic columns forming a colonnade 150 meters wide.

Facing the basilica across the piazza is the Royal Palace, its long facade studded with eight statues of the various dynasties that ruled Naples, from the Normans to the Savoys. There's a famous local legend: try to walk blindfolded from one equestrian statue to the other in a straight line. Nobody can do it — the piazza is so vast and subtly sloped that everyone drifts off course.

Rick Steves uses this square as a starting point for his Naples walk, and it's the right call. Stand here and you have the Royal Palace, the opera house, the sea, and the sweep of the bay all within a few steps.