Naples' Galleria Umberto I owes its existence, oddly enough, to cholera. When the disease swept through yet again, authorities condemned the brothel-lined streets standing here and, between 1887 and 1890, raised this glass-domed arcade in their place, named for King Umberto I, who ten years later fell to an assassin's bullet.

Modelled on Milan's great covered gallery, its four arms meet beneath a dome ringed with statues of the continents, the seasons and the sciences, a tidy monument to nineteenth-century faith in progress. That faith looked thinner by the 1940s, when Allied soldiers haunted its arcades amid wartime Naples' black market, a chaos John Horne Burns immortalised in his novel The Gallery.

VoiceMap's walking tours arrive here from the Teatro San Carlo opposite, pointing out the facade's allegorical statues before leading walkers beneath the dome toward the pastry shops selling babà and sfogliatella on the way out to Via Toledo.