I’m in Naples for an annual “boys weekend” with my old friends Giampa and Simone. Naples, Italy, that is — not Florida. Napoli, the original southern Italian city. Land of the sfogliatella, the best espresso, the birthplace of the Pizza Margherita, and of la Camorra — the vicious criminal organization.

Naples is a city of incredible beauty and scraping poverty. It’s famous for its love songs and colorful language with words that, if translated, would make a stevedore blush, but when said by a widow returning from church, sound no more scandalous than talking about the weather. It is a city of pickpockets and thieves, but also of natural generosity. If you go into a caffe in Naples and have no money, chances are good you can ask for a caffe sospeso, a free coffee paid for by a patron who anonymously left extra money for someone in need (everyone needs a Neopolitan espresso now and then).

Italians living in the more prosperous cities north of Rome consider Neopolitans dirty, lazy, good for nothing, and shiftless. They call Neopolitans terroni, an insult with similar roots and almost as demeaning as the N-word.

When I got married to my wife in the very northern bourgeois city of Padua, the graffiti on the walls said “Go away Terroni.”

Historically, northern Italian cities grew wealthy on the backs of the poor feudalistic serfs under the counts, barons, and bishops who exploited them. Peasants literally fed and fueled the Italian Renaissance, and that toil fell disproportionately on the southern Italian serfs and slaves. The image today of the poor dark-skinned peasant soiled with dirt became the caricatured “terrone” in the consciousness of most Northern Italians — a caricature that persists even today.

As cities go, Naples is among the most beautiful in the world. And in Naples, soccer is more sacred than the Vatican, even if the wealthier northern Italian teams like Juventus win far more often. Juventus not only outspends but also has been found guilty of match fixing and collusion with other northern teams and referees. So when, in the 1980s, the miraculous feet of Diego Maradona kicked Naples to the equivalent of two Super Bowl victories, the scudetto or trophy was brought to a team south of Rome for the first time in Italy’s history.

Maradona, originally Argentinian, became an outspoken city adoptee and advocate, fighting both on field and off the injustice against Naples and the south of Italy. More than any other person or saint, Maradona’s face is painted, printed, sculpted and written on every street in the city, and he is worshipped as a quasi-deity.

While I love the northern city of Florence, in the last 30 years I have seen it become more of an expensive Renaissance theme park than a city of Florentines. Most of the waiters and baristas you meet aren’t even Italian. Not so in lively Naples, surprisingly clean and crowded with locals eating, drinking, partying, dancing, and singing Neopolitan songs. Baristas, waiters, or the guy drinking espresso next to you are only too happy to tell you about their city, teach you their dialect, or talk soccer with an infectious civic pride.

Civic pride and connection to place are as important to health as eating healthy food and exercise. Walking over 25,000 steps in the streets of Naples today, eating a truly Mediterranean diet of grilled octopus, tuna, shrimp and baccala (and a delicious few glasses of Falanghina wine) and connecting to my Neapolitan roots, I find myself wishing that our own beautiful city of New London and its people learn a lesson from Napoli.