Oscans, Etruscans, Greeks and Romans all fought over Campania's fertile plain
Naples began as a small Greek trading port named after a Siren, Parthenope. The region around it, Campania, drew Etruscan colonists, Samnite raiders and Roman legions because its farmland was among the richest in Italy. Under Spanish rule, Naples grew into Europe's second-largest city after Paris.
Campania lies in southern Italy along the Tyrrhenian Sea and includes Capri and the Phlegraean islands such as Ischia and Procida. With 5,568,703 people as of 2026, it is Italy's third most populous region and its second most densely settled, and it is southern Italy's most productive economy. Oscan-speaking tribes lived there from at least the start of the 1st millennium BC; one of them, the Campanians, gave the region its name.
Between the 9th and 6th centuries BC Etruscans from central Italy planted a league of cities on the inland plains, including the ancestors of Nola and Salerno. In the 8th century BC Greeks from Euboea settled the coast and islands, founding Cumae and Pithekoussai on Ischia, and sailors from Rhodes set up Parthenope, the seed of Naples, making the area part of Magna Graecia. Warlike Samnites then pushed in and took Capua and Cumae. When Capua and later Greek Neapolis appealed to Rome, the resulting Samnite Wars of the 4th century BC ended with Campania inside the Roman Republic. Naples kept its Greek language for a time, and Misenum on the Bay of Naples became the main base of the Roman fleet.
Rome's last western emperor, Romulus Augustus, was confined near Castel dell'Ovo in 476. Byzantines and Lombards then carved the region into duchies until the Normans folded it into the Kingdom of Sicily. Frederick II founded the University of Naples, described as the oldest state university in the world, and after 1266 the Angevin king Charles I moved the capital from Palermo to Naples, sparking a wave of Gothic building including the cathedral.
The Sicilian Vespers of 1281 split the realm, leaving Naples as the mainland kingdom. Boccaccio, Petrarch and Giotto came to the city, and later Aragonese and then Spanish rule brought Iberian trade. In the Baroque era Naples hosted Caravaggio and Bernini and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno and Vico, and a fisherman named Masaniello led a revolt that created a republic lasting only months. Spanish rule ended in 1714, when Austria took over.
Source: Campania
