Today Naples is one of the most polished resort cities on the Gulf — the paradise its founders advertised — but underneath the galleries and the golf is a genuine Old-Florida story: a winter colony a Louisville newspaperman named after an Italian bay, a pier that hurricanes keep testing and the town keeps rebuilding, and an Everglades frontier that gave the world the swamp buggy. Our Naples designs gather that identity into wearable form — the pier, the alligator, the 1886 founding, the Paradise Coast. From a newspaperman's American Bay of Naples to the pier that storms could never keep down — wear a little of the Old-Florida Paradise Coast.
The Gulf shore here was Calusa homeland for centuries before any of it carried a Kentucky accent — the people who fished these waters and met the first Spanish ships off this coast in 1513; Seminole people followed in the early 1800s. The town itself begins in the autumn of 1886, when the Naples Town Improvement Company — organized by Walter N. Haldeman, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and his partner John Stuart Williams, a former Confederate general and U.S. senator from Kentucky — bought 3,712 acres between the Gulf of Mexico and Naples Bay for $11,136. They named the place after the Bay of Naples in Italy and marketed it as the "Bay of Naples of America," a winter retreat for wealthy Northern families.
Why People Visit Naples Florida
Most people come to Naples for the beaches, the golf, and the Gulf sunsets — but the city rewards anyone who looks for the older layer underneath: a winter colony planted in 1886 and named for an Italian bay, a pier rebuilt through more than a century of hurricanes, and a frontier-grit swamp-buggy tradition at the edge of the Everglades. It's bright, warm, and welcoming, with its real history sitting quietly alongside the resort polish.
