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In the center of Naples, a short walk from the Central Station, behind the statue of Garibaldi, is Via della Maddalena. It is a street located in an area called “la Duchesca” because, in that place, a large and prestigious villa had been built in the late 1400s by King Alfonso II of Aragon for his wife, Duchess Ippolita Maria Sforza. This residence, full of avenues and gardens, bordered on Castel Capuano, one of the most representative monuments of Naples.Starting from Via Maddalena and continuing along Via Antonio Ranieri, after three hundred meters, on the left, there is the entrance to the Church of San Pietro ad Aram, so called because, according to tradition, it guards the Ara Petri, the altar on which St. Peter prayed when, coming from Antioch, he landed in Naples before reaching Rome.
After Via Maddalena to the right is Via Annunziata, which at No. 34 houses the Ruota degli Esposti (Wheel of the Exposed), established in the seventeenth century to take in infants who, unable to be raised by their mothers, were placed in a kind of revolving, cylindrical, wooden compass to be entrusted to the care of the staff of this institution.
Immediately following is the Church of the Santissima Annunziata, which holds the mortal remains of Queen Giovanna II of Anjou-Durazzo. Destroyed in 1757 by fire, it was completely rebuilt by Luigi Vanvitelli, one of the greatest architects of the time, and, upon his death, by his son Carlo. However, there are not only places of historical and artistic interest in this area. In fact, after walking down Via Annunziata and the next Via Pietro Colletta, on the right, there is the Antica Pizzeria “Da Michele,” a must-see destination for tourists who come to Naples to admire not only the historic center but also to enter the pizzeria where some scenes of the movie “Eat, Pray, Love” with Julia Roberts were filmed.
Not far away is Forcella, a district that owes its name to the Y-shape of the street that originally led east toward Herculaneum and west toward the sea. From Via Forcella then starts Spaccanapoli, a long straight stretch that divides the city's historic center, which was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1995.
Actually, Spaccanapoli is not a street you can find on the city map. It is a straight stretch about two kilometers long, consisting of seven streets, from Via Forcella all the way to Via Pasquale Scura.
For the past few years Forcella has been experiencing a rebirth, through the recovery of places where there are some sites of extraordinary interest. Among these deserves to be pointed out in Vico I Carminiello ai Mannesi, between Via Duomo and Vico dei Zuroli, the archaeological complex of Carminiello ai Mannesi, so called because, in that area, the activity of manuensis was exercised, of carpenter, builder and repairer of chariots.In this place, discovered by chance when some rubble caused by the bombing of 1943 was removed, traces of the Mitreo, a temple dedicated to the god Mithra, a deity worshipped in ancient Persia and later also in the Roman Empire, were found. Again, after walking along Via Forcella and the subsequent Via Vicaria Vecchia, one reaches Piazza Crocella ai Mannesi and here, on the left, next to the early Christian Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, one cannot help but admire the mural dedicated to San Gennaro, the city's patron saint, created in 2015 by Neapolitan painter Jorit Agoch.
