Villa Comunale

This guide to the Villa Comunale in Naples follows Anton Dohrn, a young German zoologist obsessed with Darwin, who in 1872 talked the city into giving him a corner of this royal garden to build the world's first international marine research station. Short on money for scientists, he built an aquarium beneath his laboratories and sold tickets to the fashionable crowds already strolling past the bandstand and roller-skating rink. On the twenty-sixth of January 1874, the aquarium opened its doors to Neapolitans out for their evening promenade. Walk the same avenues today and you're tracing the route those first curious strollers took toward the water.