Naples: Long Beach's Island of Canals

Naples is the neighborhood I send people to when they say they want to live somewhere in the South Bay that doesn't feel like anywhere else in Southern California. It's a few minutes from my closings at 672 Stanley Ave and 520 Lexington Court, but it's its own world — three small man-made islands laced with canals, footbridges, and boats tied up at backyard docks. If you're looking at Long Beach and haven't walked Naples yet, you're missing the neighborhood that makes people fall for this city.

Naples exists because a developer named Arthur Parsons looked at a stretch of marshland off Alamitos Bay in the early 1900s and decided to build a version of Venice instead. Starting in 1905, crews dredged the wetlands and poured more than 13,000 linear feet of concrete bulkhead to carve out three islands connected by arched bridges and lined with canals — Rivo Alto, Naples, and the Alamitos Bay side. The streets still carry the Italianate names from that original vision, and the whole layout was built around romance from day one, right down to the gondolas the developers imagined gliding underneath the bridges.

That romance is still very much alive. Gondola Getaway has been running traditional Venetian gondola rides through the canals since 1982, gondoliers and all, past the docked boats and the mix of original 1920s bungalows and rebuilt architect homes that line the water. At the center of it is La Bella Fontana di Napoli, a three-tiered fountain and small park that's the unofficial heart of the island. Every December, the canals fill up again for the Naples Island Christmas Boat Parade, a tradition residents have kept going since 1946, with homeowners decorating their docks and boats winding through the waterways lit up for the holidays.

What draws buyers to Naples isn't a gimmick — it's that the canals genuinely change how you live day to day. You get walkability, water, and a tight-knit island community packed into a few blocks, with Mother's Beach and Alamitos Bay right there for paddleboarding or kayaking off your own dock if your home has one. It's a rare setup: dense, social, and steps from the water, but still residential and quiet in a way that beach-adjacent neighborhoods usually aren't. People who buy here tend to stay — it's a lifestyle purchase as much as a real estate one.

If Naples has caught your eye, I'd love to walk it with you, by foot, by boat, or with a specific listing in mind. Reach out anytime, or take a look at what's currently available in Long Beach and the surrounding South Bay.