Borgo Sant'Antonio Abate, Naples

Borgo Sant’Antonio Abate is the neighbourhood gathered around this busy market street, running between Porta Capuana and Piazza Carlo III. The street stretches for about 800 metres, and its daily market is the place’s defining tradition. Much of the district has kept its historic layout from the fifteenth century to today, making this long urban corridor feel unusually continuous.

The story begins with the abbey dedicated to Saint Anthony the Abbot, established between 1363 and 1370 on the initiative of Queen Joanna I of Anjou. Monks connected with the Tau order built a church and a hospital here. They treated shingles, known locally as Saint Anthony’s fire, and ergotism, an illness caused by eating contaminated grain.

Their remedy used pig fat, willow, and bay leaf, prepared on sheets bearing the saint’s image. As local legend has it, returning Templars revealed the recipe; the documented history is that many pilgrims coming back from the East were treated in this hospital. Later, farmers who had been pushed beyond the expanding city were allowed to use the central avenue as a marketplace. That decision created the popular market you experience here today, and it remains the district’s most vivid link between its medieval foundation and its everyday life.