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Our Naples logo carries Florida's alligator over "1845," the year of statehood and the shared emblem of every Merlin Classics Florida place. The alligator is the Everglades in shorthand — and Naples sits right at the gateway to the Everglades, the Ten Thousand Islands, and Big Cypress, where the gladesman frontier meets the Gulf-coast resort. Printed black-and-white with the worn look of an old crate label or a piece of marsh-camp signage, it reads as Old Florida. What makes this one Naples is the place behind it: the 1886 winter colony, the 1888 pier, the swamp buggy, and the home by the Gulf.
Before the golf courses and the galleries, there was a newspaperman and a pier. In 1886 a Louisville newspaper publisher bought 3,712 acres of Gulf-edge wilderness, named it after a bay in Italy, and sold it to Northern families as paradise. In 1888 he built a pier into the Gulf of Mexico — a dock that storms have taken down and the town has rebuilt time and again. That's the Old-Florida story underneath the Paradise Coast: the winter colony, the pier, the swamp buggy, and Fifth Avenue South — and this page tells it.
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.
