Is Naples Safe?

Note: This blog post was written before the Coronavirus outbreak!! By ‘safe’ I am not referring to anything about Covid, but rather how you feel walking around on the streets. At the time of posting Italy is on the travel corridor list from the UK. This post was written in October 2019!

Before going anywhere I always get the usual from family – make sure to be safe, watch out for this, etc etc. But before going to Naples we seemed to get WAY more of this, from so many different people. ‘Oh, Naples, isn’t that quite a dodgy place?’ or ‘When I went to Naples I really didn’t feel sale’. I’m massively paranoid about things like this anyway (always stressed, always think being followed/someone’s looking at me the wrong way), so I started a little bit of fear about our upcoming trip. I did some research online and again got mixed reviews. I saw various articles with the usual – stay out of certain places, be extra careful at night if you’re alone. Isn’t this what you’d say to someone going *literally* anywhere? But despite this, I still couldn’t shake this feeling of uncertainty about our trip, which was really annoying cause I wanted to be crazy excited. I hadn’t actually read anything about any specific terrible things happening, and aside from a few stories I’d heard which had happened years ago, there wasn’t much to back up this ‘Naples isn’t safe’ view everyone seemed to have.

Anyway, to cut to the chase – we LOVED Naples. And there wasn’t any point we felt unsafe at all. Of course, we kept our wits about us as you would in any city, but I didn’t feel ‘unsafe’, I just felt like I would anywhere else! When we first arrived I was a bit sceptical – our hotel was on a little street that wasn’t very well lit and there weren’t many people around, but as soon as I walked out into the morning sunshine my thoughts immediately changed. It was beautiful!

The reason I’m writing this post is because of how I felt before going and googled the question ‘Is Naples Safe’ and had a look on Pinterest, and I couldn’t really find a recent post from a travel blogger about it or any decisive posts that reassured me.

The only time I felt we needed to be extra careful was when we went to the street markets that sell all the bags and clothes. We literally stumbled upon the market by accident but it was SO busy – the streets are narrow so with stands on both sides and big crowds of people it was pretty hard to walk through – and with lots of people bumping into each other someone could easily pickpocket you – as they could in this situation in any country. At that point we just kinda kept our valuables close and got out as quick as we could (I HATE crowds!). Other than the street market though, Naples isn’t a ‘busy’ city like London . Getting the metro, walking the streets, you have plenty of space to yourself which is really nice. We went in October so it was quite a bit quieter than peak season in the summer, but it was still really hot! I’d recommend going around that time as you have good weather but there are fewer tourists around.

]

I hope to anyone who’s planning a trip to Naples and may have had the same thoughts I did, that this puts your mind at ease a bit! Of course, this is just my experience… I can’t speak for everyone and what they may have experienced, obviously bad things happen everywhere and not everyone may share my view. But I just wanted to share MY experience. And to anyone who wasn’t planning a trip to Naples – you really should! It’s a beautiful, cultural city with so much to see and do. I’ll be writing more posts on Naples, what we did there, the day trips we took out the city… So stay tuned!

Oh and another reason to go? PIZZA!

Charlotte x

Like my post? Pin it!