I started my hunt for Naples’s artisanal tailors by talking to the city’s taxi drivers. They were so acutely focused on fleecing me, I thought they might unconsciously reveal some local secrets. A working knowledge of strip joints and after-hours clubs is, of course, essential for any self-respecting taxi driver, but why would they know anything about bespoke suiting? Because, I learned after a few rides, many of them hail from the same place such suits are made, the back alleys of the Quartieri Spagnoli. It’s what Neapolitans call a popular (that is, working-class) district, situated right in the heart of the city.



The tailors of the Quartieri, unlike their taxi-driving brethren, don’t solicit customers on the street, or even advertise their wares. Everything is by word of mouth. And so my first few taxicab conversations yielded nothing in the way of secret sartorie (tailors), though I did pick up some pizza recommendations. Finally, I landed a driver who recalled a family on his block. “They’re not tailors, exactly,” he said. “They only make pants.” He gave up their address reluctantly, and only after extorting twice the price that registered on the meter.



It’s simple to find the stylish international brands that have made Naples a go-to destination for Japanese, American, and British style hounds. Just stroll down Via Filangieri in the luxe Chiaia quarter. But I was here in Naples for something entirely different: the tiny, old, often hidden ateliers and shops that very few foreigners know anything about. Most tourists, whose primary impressions of this city consist of the touts outside the railway station and the tchotchke shops of the decumani (the main east-west street), don’t think of Naples as a chic place. But the sartorie, camicerie, and cravatterie here produce suits, shirts, and ties that are coveted worldwide. Neapolitan craftsmen are historically renowned for their intricate handwork and their elegant designs.

The process was instinctive, not mechanical—craftsmanship learned from decades of practice.

I was after a totally new outfit from these craftspeople—dress pants, a suit cut according to a pattern drawn just for me, a soft-collared shirt sewn by hand, and a delicately contoured necktie to round out the package. But I was also in search of a disappearing culture that once animated Naples, a culture of aging artisans who learned their craft as children, long before labor laws made such a thing impossible; a culture in which generations of a single family patronized the same tailor for their suits. I wanted to discover what was tucked into alleyways barely wide enough for a motorbike to pass. And I wanted to understand why this subtext of the elegant and the artisanal was so strong in a city more famous for mounds of garbage and men wearing wife-beaters.



At number 21 Vico della Tofa, the address the cabbie had given me, I walked into the courtyard of an old apartment building and asked the first man I met about the pants-making family. He knew nothing, but my question provoked a shout from an open window above. “The Mola family,” a gravelly female voice said. “Go up to the third floor and look for the sign.” Outside a third-floor apartment I found a small gold plaque that read Mola. I rang the bell and a middle-aged man escorted me inside as if I had been expected, taking me through his family’s cluttered apartment rooms into an ancient studio where he measured, drew, cut, and fabricated pants. “We’ve been doing this for five generations,” the man, Pasquale Mola, told me, pointing to the pants he was wearing. “We only make pants,” he said. “Nothing else.” He had the frenzied energy of so many Neapolitans I encountered, something I would come to understand and appreciate after I started to drink as many espressos as they do.

Photo by Francesco Lastrucci

Photo by Francesco Lastrucci

The city’s reputation as a dirty and dangerous place has actually allowed these artisans to ply their trade in much the same fashion they have for centuries.

While Pasquale manned the most important station, the chalking and cutting table, his brother operated an antique-looking iron to press seams, and his sister sat at a sewing machine stitching together the two halves of the pants patterns. I asked Pasquale about their business. “We get a lot of work from suitmakers,” he said. “They make the jackets, we make the pants. And now we even have customers from Japan.” He held up a pair of Mola pants and peeked through the crotch. “Look at the curve of the opening for the legs,” he said. “You need to see light through there. You need shape. That makes for a more elegant line.” The pants are made with a button closure, not a zipper, and the waistband is constructed out of shirting material for extra softness. When I asked Pasquale about making a pair of pants for me, at first he said it would take weeks, maybe even a month. By the time I left, though, he had measured me and even started tracing my pattern onto the brown linen I had selected for my trousers. And we had agreed that I’d be able to pick them up in four days, after one more fitting.The next objective of my Naples quest was the holy grail, a full suit. But before I set off on that search, I needed to improve my look, so I visited Boellis, one of the oldest barbershops in Italy, discreetly perched on the second floor of a building off the main street in tony Chiaia. Michele Boellis greeted me at the door and led me to a beautiful old barber chair. He asked me a few questions about how short I wanted my hair, and then he proceeded to cut it in a manner at once more brutal, more rapid, and more skilled than I had ever experienced. He wielded his scissors with such speed and precision that I hardly felt a thing. It made me think immediately of the way a tailor cuts through suiting fabric with giant shears. Michele later said that my analogy wasn’t far off: His great-grandfather had been a tailor, and Michele saw what he did now as a continuation of that legacy.When the haircut was finished, a shave specialist lathered up my beard with a sweet-smelling almond soap, and Michele explained his philosophy on hair. “Everything we do here is natural, soft, organic,” he said, as his assistant’s straight razor scraped across my skin. “No gel, no foam, no products to position your hair. Hair shouldn’t be perfect. Not in Naples.” After he finished the shave, the assistant soaped my cheeks, chin, and neck again, and shaved me a second time. It was the smoothest my skin had felt since early adolescence, and it would last for a good two days. I walked out of the shop freshly shaved and shorn and ready to commission a suit.Naples’ suitmakers are the city’s most highly valued artisans. I had to select my man (there are no women to choose from) carefully. On a user-driven website called Styleforum I had found a reference to Gennaro Solito. His shop is tucked into a solid old building on Via Toledo, the city’s main artery. Technically, this is still the Quartieri Spagnoli, but it’s a more commercial and refined side of the quarter. A discreet plaque identifies the place. The glass door reads simply Solito.The anteroom to his work space was crowded with bolts of fabric. Inside, suits in progress were draped from every available hook and hanger, and Gennaro, 67 years old, stood behind a large wooden table, chalking and cutting the components of one of his jackets. The room had a window that looked onto Piazza Duca d’Aosta, where a funicular transported people up a steep hill to Vomero, one of the city’s fashionable neighborhoods. Gennaro’s son Luigi, aka Gigi, 36, worked in the shop too, learning how to do things the way his father had been doing them for more than 50 years.

With Gigi translating, I talked to Gennaro about what distinguishes his tailoring. “I began doing this before I was 10,” he said. “I do what I do. I can try to accommodate some strange requests, but really, what people come to me for is the classic Neapolitan style.” He took a jacket off a hanger and passed it to me. “Feel how soft it is,” he said, using the Italian word morbido. “There’s no shoulder padding at all. There’s not much lining. It’s light, and so it moves easily and comfortably with your body.” For my suit I had chosen a lush three-ply Italian weave in a dark blue that shimmered subtly in the sun. Gigi took the fabric from me, walked it upstairs to the workshop, and wrapped it in water-soaked canvas to wash and shrink the suiting before it would be cut.



When I came back the next morning, Gennaro took a tape from around his neck and started to measure me. After just a few minutes he returned to his table, numbers in hand, unfurled the part of my fabric he’d reserved for the jacket, and proceeded to lay out my personal pattern. He picked up a small rectangle of chalk that looked like a soap bar and sharpened it on a multibladed machine that sat on his tabletop. Then he started to draw, first mapping out the basic shape of the jacket, then meticulously defining the subtle curves of the lapel and the sweep of the distinctive chest pocket Neapolitans call a barchetta, or “little boat.” The process was instinctive, not mechanical—craftsmanship learned from decades of practice.



After a few rubouts and redraws, Gennaro, satisfied with the template, took up a pair of enormous scissors and quickly snipped out my pattern. The larger scissors permit smoother cuts, Gennaro explained, and he had been using this pair for 40 years. “Come back this afternoon,” he told me. “It will be ready for the first fitting then.” He would pass the pants measurements on to another tailor. As Pasquale Mola had implied, almost no suitmakers in Naples actually make trousers. Jacket making and pants making are considered two separate disciplines, too complicated for any one person to handle alone.

Photo by Francesco Lastrucci

In Naples, elegance is more fluid and informal.

As Gennaro’s men sewed the jacket, I wandered down the street into the market area of Pignasecca, where, amid centuries-old buildings, streetside fishmongers sang out their freshest offerings in the local dialect. As chain supermarkets like Spar and discount designer stores like H&M increasingly dominate Europe’s retail sector, Naples remains resolutely and proudly provincial. That provincialism permits juxtapositions of extremes that a globalized and homogenized culture does not. In Pignasecca, dandies decked out in their finest suits sipped coffee next to butchers still covered in blood.I stopped to chat with an older woman as she cooked me a fried pizza in her kitchen. She sold pizzas on the street in front of her home, a first-floor apartment called a basso, to make a little extra money. As I bit into a steaming piece of fried dough filled with tomato sauce, meat, and cheese, she told me to come back the next day for a zucchini-flower fritter she makes only on Saturdays.Just like the pizza fritta lady, Naples’s suitmakers and shirtmakers shine because they haven’t bowed down to the whims and pressures of the tourist market. The city’s reputation as a dirty and dangerous place has actually allowed these artisans to ply their trade in much the same fashion they have for centuries. Tourists pass through here quickly, en route to the islands of Ischia or Capri, or the seaside areas of the Sorrento Peninsula and the Amalfi Coast. As a result, Naples remains a city where tailors, trattorias, and barbers have to please a local clientele to stay in business. Interestingly, while artisanal trades have shrunk in the past few decades, appreciation of them by people abroad has increased. And what these knowledgeable foreign customers want, so far, is the Neapolitan style, authentic and unvarnished.