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Posillipo (1) & Villa Rosebery
The prominent city landmarks such as the San Martino Museum, the Castel Sant'Elmo, the Royal Palace, the Angevin Fortress, the Castel dell'Ovo (Egg Castle) are
all immediately viewable from the harbor or shortly
after rounding the breakwater and moving west. At the
end of the seaside park called the Villa Comunale is
the small harbor of Mergellina,
mentioned in documents from the 13th-century and
besung in a number of Neapolitan Songs. The actual
meat of the excursion, however, is the long stretch of
the Posillipo hill and coastline. The immediate impression along the whole stretch is
of disastrous overbuilding. That impression
corresponds 100% to the post-war reality of the area.
Photos from the early 1900s show a still largely
wooded area with farmhouses scattered on the slope and
villas along the coast. It is, however, rewarding to
keep your eye on the string of villas that are at the
waters edge (top photo). They are among the most
exclusive bits of property in Naples and always have
been; that is, near the cape, there are Roman ruins at
water's edge. Higher up along the cliff face, just
before the cape, you can even see the openings of the
air-shafts that ventilated the Seiano Grotto that led
to the residence of Vedius
Pollio and even catch a glimpse of his
amphitheater on a height. The houses at water's edge
all have at least small piers or landings, and there
are even a few small coves with breakwaters along the
way. These small harbors are the nuclei for separate,
named communities such as Marechiaro and Gaiola. update: May 2009
Villa Rosebery has a very
mixed history. In 1801, an Austrian admiral in the
fleet of Bourbon Naples, Josef von Thurn (one of the
officers on the court-martial board that condemned
Caracciolo to death in 1799—click
here) bought the land and built on it. It was
confiscated by the Bonaparte government of Murat in 1806 but returned to
the admiral after the Restoration in 1815. The admiral
sold the property, and in 1857 it came into the hands
of Luigi di Borbone, the brother of the king of
Naples. He called the property la Brasiliana
in honor of his wife, the sister of the emperor of
Brazil.
 The
property was used sporadically in the 1930s as a
residence by the Italian royal family when they were in
Naples. After WWII, the Villa Rosebery was requisitioned
briefly by the Allies, then used for a few years by the
Italian Air Force Academy; finally, in 1957 it was
declared one of the official presidential residences in
Italy.The heavily wooded estate is dotted with a few buildings such as the Grande Foresteria, (where the president stays) the Seaside Cottage (down at the harbor, photo, above) and a smaller guest house, still referred to—in spite of the anachronism—as the "Bourbon Palace" (photo, above, left).
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One of the
advantages of living in a big city on a seacoast is
that you don't have to hunt down green urban oases to
get away from it all. Those patches do exist in
Naples, to be sure—the 
Among the many residences,
fabled and not so, along the coast, one that most
attracts the eye is the 
At the unification of Italy
and the exile of the Bourbons, the property went
through a succession of sales and in the 1890s was
bought by Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of
Rosebery (1847-1929), and British Prime Minister for
the short Liberal stewardship of the government in
1895. He was witty, articulate, gave his name to this
beautiful estate on the Posillipo coast, fashioned
much of the property along the lines of an English
garden, and then generously donated the property to
the Italian state. Among his other notable
achievements, Archie owned and raced horses and was
apparently the only man to win the Derby while serving
as Prime Minister. (He wasn't the jockey, I don't
think, but he did own the horse.)