Naples Took the Padding Out of the Jacket. Chiaia Is Where to See How

In 1914 a Neapolitan named Eugenio Marinella opened a shop of about 20 square meters on the Riviera di Chiaia, at Piazza Vittoria, facing the bay. He wanted it to feel like a small corner of England, and after the renovation he traveled to London to meet the suppliers who would stock it. More than a century later the shop is still at 287 Riviera di Chiaia, still in the hands of the family, and still dressed in its original Art Nouveau fittings. It opens at 6:30 a.m., Monday to Saturday. If you want to understand how Naples thinks about clothes, start there before the city wakes up.

A seafront district with money

Chiaia is the affluent stretch of Naples that runs along the water from Piazza Vittoria in the east to Mergellina in the west. It is often described as one of the wealthiest districts in the city, and its main shopping streets are lined with luxury brands. The tailoring history and the sightseeing sit a short walk apart.

The spine of the district is a single route with two names. Via dei Mille opened in 1885 as part of the Risanamento, the urban renewal that remade much of Naples after unification. It is named after the Thousand, the volunteers who sailed with Garibaldi in 1860. At its far end it meets Via Gaetano Filangieri, and the two streets read as one continuous run of Liberty facades and good shop windows.

Where they meet stands Palazzo Mannajuolo, built from 1909 to 1911 to a design by Giulio Ulisse Arata with the engineers Gioacchino Luigi Mellucci and Giuseppe Mannajuolo. It was built in reinforced concrete in the Liberty style, and its elliptical staircase of cantilevered marble steps is worth timing your walk around.

The shoulder that changed the jacket

The reason tailoring people come to Naples is a single construction detail. In the 1920s, Neapolitan tailors including Vincenzo Attolini and Antonio Caggiula turned away from the heavy British jacket that had dominated the city's best shops. They cut something lighter and unstructured, and it became the Neapolitan jacket.

Its signature is the spalla camicia, the shirt shoulder. There is no shoulder pad. The sleeve is cut roughly 10 centimeters larger than the armhole and sewn in like the sleeve of a shirt, so the extra cloth gathers into small ripples at the top, a look the tailors call manica a mappina. The shoulder follows the natural line of the body and the arm moves freely, which matters in a city this warm. More formal Neapolitan jackets swap the shirt shoulder for a small padded roll known as the rollino.

Look for the breast pocket too. The barchetta, or little boat, is a curved patch pocket with one corner set higher than the other and a rounded base. It does nothing practical, but it marks a Neapolitan jacket across a room. If you have already walked Savile Row, you will feel the difference the moment you try one on. London builds a jacket around you. Naples tries to make you forget it is there.

London House on Via Filangieri

The house that carried this idea out of Naples began with a borrowed name. In the early 1930s, 1932 by most accounts though one Italian source says 1931, Gennaro Rubinacci opened a tailoring house called London House on Via Filangieri, at No. 25 according to the house's Wikipedia history. Gennaro, from a shipping family, was a cavalry officer and art collector who had long advised Neapolitan society on cloth and cut. The name was a nod to London, then the capital of men's style, and to the British cloth he admired. His aim was a soft, unlined jacket a man could wear outside the office.

His son Mariano took over in 1961 and later renamed the business Rubinacci, keeping the old initials in the logo. Sources disagree on when the name changed, with dates ranging from 1963 to 1970. Mariano also established a museum of Neapolitan tailoring in Naples. A Milan branch opened in 1989 and a London shop followed in 2005. In 2014 a Rubinacci suit entered the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the first by a Neapolitan tailor. Gennaro's grandson Luca later became creative director and launched the ready-to-wear line. The Rubinacci entry on Wikipedia is a good primer before you book a fitting.

Ties on the Riviera

Back on the water, E. Marinella remains the stop nobody skips. The founder's grandson Maurizio Marinella and his son Alessandro run it now, and the shop on the Riviera has been joined by stores in Milan, Rome, London and Tokyo. The ties have long served as Italian diplomatic gifts. In the 1980s President Francesco Cossiga began handing visiting heads of state boxes of five Marinella ties, and Marinella ties were shown at MoMA in the 2017 to 2018 exhibition Items: Is Fashion Modern?

Hours shift in summer. In August the shop opens later on weekdays, closes Sundays and shuts entirely from August 12 to 16, so check the E. Marinella boutique page before you go. Then walk a block inland to Piazza dei Martiri. Under the Bourbons it was called Piazza della Pace. After unification it was rededicated to the city's patriots, with a bronze statue of the virtue of the martyrs by Emanuele Caggiano on top of the column. The four lions at its base each stand for a failed or successful revolt, those of 1799, 1820, 1848 and 1860.

Between fittings

Chiaia rewards the gaps in a tailoring schedule. The Villa Comunale runs along the Riviera, laid out in the 1780s by Ferdinand IV as a royal garden and opened permanently to the public in 1869. Inside it sits the Stazione Zoologica, the marine research station Anton Dohrn founded in 1872.

Across the road, Villa Pignatelli was built in 1826 for Admiral Ferdinand Acton, with Pietro Valente completing the design. Carl Mayer von Rothschild bought it after Acton died in 1841, the Pignatelli family took it over in 1867, and Princess Rosa Fici left it to the Italian state in 1952 on the condition that nothing be changed. A carriage museum opened in its garden in 1975, with French and English vehicles from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

End at Castel dell'Ovo, on the former island of Megaride, between Chiaia and the San Ferdinando district. The Normans built the first castle there in the twelfth century and it took its present shape under the Aragonese in the fifteenth. Legend says the poet Virgil hid an egg in the foundations and that the city will suffer if it ever breaks. The Borgo Marinaro beside it is now a marina lined with restaurants. A fitting deserves a fresh shave, and our story on Truefitt and Hill explains why the old barbers still matter.

For more, see city guides, travel guides, tailoring and the Quiet Menace travel section. If you are heading north by train, our Florence and Oltrarno guide picks up the thread.

The simplest test of a Neapolitan jacket is to raise your arm. A London coat lifts with you. A good one from Chiaia barely notices, which is the whole point, and the reason men still fly in for it.