Vomero

This guide to Vomero in Naples opens in 1889, when the hillside was still broccoli fields too steep for a proper neighborhood, and a bank building the first funicular bolted imported steam engines to a winch to haul carriages up a nearly thirty percent grade. Steam proved unreliable, so within eleven years Swiss electric motors replaced the boilers, and a second funicular soon followed. Then in 1928 came a harder question: what happens on a mountain cable the one day the power fails. Listen for the hum of the cars climbing past the villas that filled the hill once it became livable.