Port'Alba

This guide to Port'Alba in Naples follows the gate's double birthday: the flatbread oven a family named Luciano fired up here in 1738, and the pizzeria they opened in the same room in 1830. You'll hear how King Ferdinand the Second slipped through in disguise to eavesdrop on his subjects, and how the packed secondhand bookstalls have lined the alley since the eighteenth century. It also traces an evening when the dialect poet Ferdinando Russo faced off against Gabriele D'Annunzio in a verse duel over pizza in this same room.