Naples Trivia
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48 free Naples trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Naples trivia quiz covers a city founded by Greeks, ruled by Normans, Angevins, Spaniards and Bourbons, and squeezed between two volcanoes. It opens with the essentials: the region, the Siren the first colony was named after, the meaning of Neapolis, and the two ancient towns buried nearby in AD 79. Then it works through the kingdoms and their leftovers: the egg Virgil supposedly hid under a castle, the fisherman who led a revolt in 1647, the plague that halved the population, the Bourbon king who built a palace to rival Versailles, the first railway in Italy, and Garibaldi's arrival in 1860. The second half is the living city. San Gennaro's blood liquefying three times a year, the oldest working opera house in the world, the Veiled Christ, the metro station voted Europe's most beautiful, the coffee pot that led to the espresso machine, the queen who lent her name to a pizza, the shell-shaped pastry, the song written for a funicular up Vesuvius, and the Argentine whose name is now on the football stadium. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Naples and its landmarks, dishes and people, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Naples is the capital of which Italian region?
Campania
Campania's capital ruled a kingdom covering all of southern Italy for nearly 600 years, until unification in 1861 reduced it to a regional seat.
Q 02The first Greek colony on the site of Naples was named after which mythological figure?
Parthenope, a Siren
Parthenope, a Siren, is said to have drowned herself when her song failed to lure Odysseus, and her body washed up where the first colony was founded.
Q 03What does Neapolis, the Greek name that became Naples, mean?
New town
New town it literally was: Greek settlers built it about 600 BC beside an older colony, which came to be called Palaepolis, the 'old city'.
Q 04Which boy emperor, deposed in 476, was sent to live in Naples?
Romulus Augustulus
Romulus Augustulus was spared for his youth, given a pension by the general who deposed him, and housed in a villa on the islet where the city's seafront castle now stands.
Q 05How did the Byzantine general Belisarius get into Naples in 536?
Through an aqueduct
Through an aqueduct: a soldier exploring the dry channel found a gap in the rock, engineers quietly widened it, and troops slipped in by night to open the city from inside.
Q 06Which French prince, brother of Louis IX, made Naples his capital in place of Palermo?
Charles I
Charles I of Anjou conquered the south in the 1260s with the pope's backing, built the Castel Nuovo as his seat, and filled the city with French officials and Gothic churches.
Q 07Naples's Federico II, founded in 1224, is regarded as the world's oldest institution of what kind?
State-funded secular university
State-funded secular university: Emperor Frederick II decreed it into being before it had a single student, then forbade his subjects to study anywhere else.
Q 08Which 1282 uprising against French rule split the southern kingdom, leaving Naples with only the mainland?
The Sicilian Vespers
The Sicilian Vespers began at evening prayers outside Palermo on Easter Monday, when a brawl with French soldiers turned into a massacre and the island went over to Aragon.
Q 09Which hook-nosed commedia dell'arte clown, a folk symbol of Naples, is the ancestor of Mr Punch?
Pulcinella
Pulcinella crossed to England with Italian puppeteers in the 1660s, where his name was shortened to Punch and he gained a wife called Judy.
Q 10By 1600 Naples was often ranked Europe's second-largest city, behind only which capital?
Paris
Paris is the usual answer, on rankings that leave out Ottoman Constantinople; Naples had grown from about 100,000 people to 250,000 in a century.
Q 11What was the trade of Masaniello, who led Naples's 1647 revolt against Spanish rule?
Fisherman
Fisherman Masaniello was 27 when a new tax on fruit made him the people's leader; within days hired assassins had murdered him, and an 1828 opera retold his story.
Q 12Which disease killed about half the people of Naples in 1656?
Plague
Plague reached the city in April 1656, was checked only by sealing off the poorer districts, and left at least 150,000 Neapolitans dead.
Q 13Which town near Naples holds the vast Bourbon palace begun in 1752 to rival Versailles?
Caserta
Caserta's palace has some 1,200 rooms, yet the king who ordered it left to take the Spanish throne in 1759 and never spent a night there.
Q 21Who is the patron saint of Naples?
Januarius
Januarius, San Gennaro in Italian, was by tradition a bishop beheaded around 305 under Diocletian; emigrants carried his feast to New York's Little Italy, where it fills the streets each September.
Q 22What do crowds gather in Naples Cathedral to watch the dried blood of the city's patron saint do?
It liquefies
It liquefies, believers say, inside a sealed glass vial; when it stays solid, Neapolitans take it as a warning of trouble ahead.
Q 23According to legend, what did a Roman poet turned sorcerer hide beneath Naples's seafront castle?
A magical egg
A magical egg, the story goes, lies hidden in the foundations, and the fortress cannot fall while it stays whole; hence the name Castel dell'Ovo, the Egg Castle.
Q 14In 1839 Naples became the first city on the Italian peninsula to have what?
A railway
A railway: the king himself opened the 7 km line to his palace at Portici, worked by English-built locomotives, and 131,000 passengers rode it in the first three months.
Q 15After which city's 1815 congress did the restored Bourbon king merge Naples and Sicily into the Two Sicilies?
Vienna
Vienna's congress redrew Europe after Napoleon and backed the Bourbon return to Naples, won by Austrian arms; in December 1816 Ferdinand fused his two crowns into one kingdom.
Q 16Whose Expedition of the Thousand ended Bourbon rule in Naples?
Giuseppe Garibaldi
Giuseppe Garibaldi entered Naples on 7 September 1860 to cheering crowds; then, a republican by conviction, he handed the whole south to a king, Victor Emmanuel II.
Q 17Why did King Ferdinand II have the Bourbon Tunnel dug beneath Naples in 1853?
To guard against a revolt
To guard against a revolt: after the riots of 1848 he wanted a hidden road between palace and barracks; never finished, it sheltered thousands from bombs in the Second World War.
Q 18The Four Days of Naples in September 1943 was an uprising against whom?
German occupation forces
German occupation forces had ordered the city's men into forced labour; four days of street fighting drove them out, and the Allies arrived to find Naples already free.
Q 19Naples lies between Mount Vesuvius and which other volcanic region?
The Phlegraean Fields
The Phlegraean Fields are a vast caldera whose ground slowly rises and sinks, a restlessness called bradyseism that has badly damaged the port town at its centre.
Q 20Which two Roman towns near Naples were destroyed by Vesuvius in AD 79?
Pompeii and Herculaneum
Pompeii and Herculaneum stayed buried for more than 16 centuries until Bourbon-sponsored digging began in 1738, and the finds reshaped European taste.
Q 24Emperor Tiberius spent most of his final decade ruling Rome from Villa Jovis on which island off Naples?
Capri
Capri kept Tiberius away from Rome for years, leaving the city to his prefect Sejanus, who used the emperor's absence to make his own bid for power.
Q 25Naples's Teatro di San Carlo holds which distinction among the world's opera houses?
Oldest continuously active opera venue
Oldest continuously active opera venue: it opened in 1737, decades before La Scala, and when fire gutted it in 1816 the king had it rebuilt within ten months.
Q 26The shroud on Naples's Veiled Christ looks like see-through cloth but was carved from the same block of what?
Marble
Marble: the patron's contract demanded a shroud cut from the same block as the body, and Antonio Canova later said he would give ten years of his life to have made it.
Q 27Which Italian dynasty's art collection forms the core of the Naples National Archaeological Museum?
The Farnese
The Farnese sculptures came to Naples because the family died out in the male line and its treasures passed, through Elisabetta Farnese, to her son, the city's Bourbon king.
Q 28Which Naples Metro station, opened in 2012, has been called Europe's most beautiful?
Toledo
Toledo station ran into an underground aquifer during building, so its Spanish designer made water the theme, with mosaics that deepen from ochre to sea blue on the way down.
Q 29Whose 17th-century career made Naples a capital of the Baroque?
Caravaggio
The city also fostered the School of Posillipo and Neapolitan Liberty, its version of Art Nouveau.
Q 30The art of the Neapolitan pizzaiolo is inscribed on which UNESCO list?
Intangible Cultural Heritage
Intangible Cultural Heritage status came in 2017 for the craft itself: four stages of working the dough and baking it, with a turn of the baker's wrist, in a wood-fired oven.