Why Is Naples, Florida Called Naples?

Who Named Naples, Florida, and When?

Naples wasn’t named by settlers who’d fished this water for a generation and finally picked a name that fit. It was named on paper, before the town had a single permanent resident, by a group of Kentucky businessmen who’d barely set foot on this stretch of Gulf coast. In 1886, Louisville newspaper publisher Walter Haldeman and former Kentucky governor John Stuart Williams organized the Naples Town Improvement Company and bought up a wild, empty run of coastline south of Fort Myers. They weren’t buying farmland or citrus groves — they were buying a bay, a beach and a pitch they could mail north to wealthy buyers shivering through another Kentucky winter.

The company platted streets on a grid running from the bay out to the Gulf, sold lots sight-unseen through a prospectus mailed north, and the town already had its name before the first hotel guest ever stepped off a steamer. That decision — made in a boardroom hundreds of miles away, built on a resemblance the investors were selling as much as describing — is the entire answer to why this Gulf Coast city is called Naples.

Why Compare It to Naples, Italy?

The comparison was the sales pitch, plain and simple. Early visitors and the investors themselves looked at the crescent sweep of the bay here, backed by mangroves instead of Mount Vesuvius, and decided it evoked the famous Bay of Naples on Italy’s coast. It wasn’t a literal resemblance — nobody was claiming Gordon Pass looked like the Amalfi coastline. It was a feeling: warm light on open water, a curve of shoreline built for leisure, the promise of an endless winter a world away from Kentucky snow. A name like “Naples” carried a whiff of the Mediterranean that read beautifully in a prospectus mailed to prospective buyers up north, and it stuck before the town had time to earn a plainer, more literal name off a local landmark or a founder’s surname.

There was substance behind the marketing, too, which is probably why the name outlasted the pitch. Word had already reached Kentucky that tarpon here ran big enough to bend a rod double, the water stayed warm through January, and the beach ran arrow-straight for miles without a single building on it. The name sold an experience the place could actually deliver — which is a big part of why it worked, and why more than a century later you’ll hear a version of the same pitch from a Naples boat tour captain today: warm water, big fish, and a bay worth naming something after.

The 1888 Pier and Naples’ Boat-Only Founding Years

The name came first, but the pier is what actually built the town. By 1888, the Naples Company had a hotel and a wooden pier standing out into the Gulf, and for nearly forty years afterward, that pier was the only real front door Naples had. There was no highway, no rail spur, no bridge across the bay. Guests, mail, lumber and furniture all arrived the same way: by boat, threading in from the Gulf through Gordon Pass into Naples Bay, or aboard a coastal steamer working down the coast from Punta Gorda and Fort Myers.

That boat-only stretch shaped the whole town. Naples grew up facing the water instead of a highway, which is part of why Old Naples still reads as a place built to be approached from the bay rather than a road. Our own boats still thread that same Gordon Pass entrance on the way into Naples Bay today, running past the low rooflines and the pier — minus the multi-day steamer ride down from Punta Gorda the town’s first visitors had to make just to see it.

Seeing Old Naples and the Pier From the Water Today

Walk the streets of Old Naples now, around Third Street South or Fifth Avenue South, and you’re walking a neighborhood that still keeps its rooflines low and its blocks close to the bay — a layout that owes more to a 19th-century steamship dock than to any modern highway grid. The pier itself has been rebuilt more than once over the decades, most recently after Hurricane Ian tore through in 2022, and it remains the structure locals point to when they’re explaining where downtown sits relative to the beach.

But the view most visitors never get is the one our captains see on every run out past it: the pier and the Old Naples skyline from offshore, the same approach the founding-era steamships used to make. A sunset cruise that swings past the pier’s pilings on the way toward Gordon Pass puts you in exactly the spot those first Kentucky-bound guests arrived from, watching the same light the marketing pitch was actually selling all along. If you’re curious how another nearby name came to be, our Marco Island name history tells a very different story just a few miles south.

Is Naples, Florida Actually Like Naples, Italy?

Geographically, the honest answer is not really — and that’s fine. Naples, Florida doesn’t have a 2,500-year-old harbor or a volcano on the horizon; it has mangrove-lined barrier islands, a shallow Gulf bay, and a coastline shaped by hurricanes rather than Roman engineers. The two cities share a name, a general shape of bay, and a marketing instinct more than they share actual geography or history. What Naples, Florida really borrowed wasn’t a skyline — it was an idea: that a curved, sheltered bay facing open water is worth naming after somewhere people already associate with leisure and warmth.

Where the comparison does hold up is in the feel of the place. Both cities are built around a waterfront that people arrive at by boat as much as by road, both lean hard on fresh seafood and open-air life, and both treat their historic pier or harbor as the anchor everything else grew up around. That’s the version of “Naples” worth chasing here — not a literal Italian skyline, but the same instinct that made the original worth naming a city after in the first place: water you actually want to be out on. Browse the full Travel Guide for more honest answers before you book, or head straight for the bay and judge the resemblance yourself.