Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (2011) and the rest of the Neapolitan Novels — the defining literary portrait of twentieth-century Naples. Ferrante's four novels follow two women from a poor neighbourhood in the 1950s through to the 2000s, mapping the city's transformation — and its stubborn failure to transform — with extraordinary precision. The language, the violence, the beauty, and the claustrophobia of Neapolitan life are all here.
Curzio Malaparte, The Skin (1949) — A brutal, hallucinatory novel set in Naples during the Allied occupation of 1944. Malaparte was a strange, compromised figure (a Fascist turned anti-Fascist) and The Skin is a correspondingly strange book — part novel, part memoir, part dark fable. It captures a city in extremis in a way nothing else does.
Francesco Rosi, director, not a book but — if you want to feel the texture of older Naples before reading about it, watch Rosi's film "Hands Over the City" (Le mani sulla città, 1963), about property speculation and corruption in postwar Naples. It is also a useful reminder that some things change slowly.
Norman Lewis, Naples '44 (1978) — A British intelligence officer's diary from the Allied occupation. Written with clear-eyed compassion and dark humour, it describes a city surviving under catastrophic conditions. One of the finest pieces of wartime writing in English.