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Carmine Church & the Porta Capuana Castle If by "city walls" you mean the ancient Greek or Roman ones that surrounded Neapolis, there is nothing left of those above ground in modern Naples. There are, however, some fragments that have been excavated and left open for viewing; the most prominent one is the section of the Greek wall visible at Piazza Bellini. The rest has disappeared under—in some cases—natural catastrophe, such as mudslides (a prominent one occurred in the sixth century), or was simply torn down or built over in the typically palimpsest approach to urban planning that has characterized Naples in its long history. The medieval walls are a different story. Starting with the Angevins in the 14th–century and continuing well into the Spanish and even Bourbon periods in Naples, the protective wall around Naples was constantly under some phase of construction and renewal. That changed in the late 19th– and early 20th–century, during the Risanamento—the great urban renewal of the city. Massive portions of the medieval walls were torn down; some bits were left standing as historical markers, and segments of the wall were simply incorporated into modern buildings.
 If you walk north into the
city from that point along what used to be the line of
the eastern wall of the medieval city, you will probably
get lost, but—after some judicious zigging and
zagging—you will eventually come to Porta Capuana
and Castel Capuano (photo, right), so-named
because this was the point in the city walls where the
road led out to the city of Capua. The castle is at the
end of via dei
Tribunali and housed the Naples Hall of Justice
until quite recently (when that facility was transferred
to the new Centro Direzionale).
Castel Capuana was built in the twelfth century by
William I, the son of Roger
the Norman, the first monarch of the Kingdom of
Naples. It was expanded by the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II of Swabia and
became one of his royal palaces. Under the Spanish
viceroyship of Don Pedro de Toledo in the sixteenth
century, it became the Hall of Justice, the basements of
which served as a prison. Over the entrance to the
castle you still see the crest of the Emperor Charles V,
who visited Naples in 1535. The castle has undergone
many restorations, one as recent as 1860, and thus no
longer retains a great deal of its original appearance. Today's
Porta Capuana (photo, left), in spite of the name, is not
the ancient gateway to the decumanus maximus, the
main east-west road that once led out of Roman Naples to
Capua. When the city was extended eastwards, the
construction of the new Aragonese
city walls meant relocating the original gate, which
had been closer to the castle. The present gate was built
in 1484. It is still there and you can drive or walk
through and around it.
The most interesting examples of how the medieval walls
have simply been incorporated into more modern buildings
occur if you keep moving along that same line of the
eastern wall to the point where it turned left to run
along the northern side of medieval Naples, along what
is now via Foria. At that corner is an enormous building
now housing municipal office space but with the
inscription Caserma [barracks] Garibaldi
still prominent on the façade. That ex-barracks
was the medieval monastery of San Giovanni a Carbonara, which,
itself, was built using the corner formed by the meeting
of the eastern and northern walls of the city as two
sides of the monastery and then building the rest behind
that barrier.
The medieval western wall of the city—which, itself,
followed the line of the ancient Roman wall—was simply
knocked down by the Spanish in the 1500s when they
decided to expand the city beyond the ancient confines
and move up the hill towards the Sant' Elmo Fortress.
The long straight road, via Toledo, laid by the Spanish
in that period is well outside the ancient city. The
Spanish moved Port'Alba, originally one of the main
gates in the medieval western wall of the city, a few
hundred yards to the west (where it remains today), such
that it opened onto the new Spanish section of the city.
By that time, the old west wall no longer served any
defensive purpose and much of it went the way of all old
walls in Naples—torn down, ploughed under, built over,
and, in some cases, reincarnated as parts of newer
buildings. to: portal index for
architecture and urban planning
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The most obvious
historical marker is the part of the wall, fortress and
pillars (photo, left) at what used to be the south-east
corner of the city wall across from Piazza Mercato
and the Church of the Carmine (photo below, left). There
is not much left of the fortress, and the ruins you see
are often referred to simply as "part of the old wall
down by the port". In reality, this is what remains of
the Castello del Carmine, now on the main road
that runs east along the industrial port of Naples. It
was built by the Angevin ruler, Charles III of Durazzo,
in the 1380s. It was a true fortress and at the center
of battles during the Angevin and subsequent 
Directly across the
street is Church of Santa Maria del Carmine
(photo, left) at one end of Piazza Mercato
(Market Square), one of the most historic sites in
Naples. The church itself was founded in the 12th
century by Carmelite monks driven from the Holy Land in
the Crusades. The historic name of Piazza Mercato
is Piazza Moricino. It was the site in 1268 of
the execution of Corradino, the last Hohenstaufen
pretender to the throne of the kingdom of Naples, at the
hands of Charles I of Anjou, thus beginning the
important Angevin reign of the kingdom. In 1647 the
square was also the site of battles between rebels and
royal troops during Masaniello's Revolt, and in 1799 the
scene of the mass execution of leaders of the Neapolitan
Republic. 
As you walk west along via Foria, keeping
an eye on the dense row of buildings that now stand
where the wall used to be, the most obvious thing is
that modern office and apartment buildings are not only
much higher than the original wall, but that—in the case
of one school—as high as what was the acropolis of the
original Greek city, itself; the city sloped
dramatically upwards in that direction. Piazza Cavour
and the