This wealthy community is rapidly becoming a prime tourist spot. It's filled with upscale restaurants, boutiques, resorts and 40 mi/65 km of public beaches. Activities include sailing and windsurfing, and many boats are available for charter or day cruises.
Inland, you can take a Naples Trolley to get a look at the city. Then it's time for shopping—a major activity in the city. The Avenues is a large retail area in town, and Third Street and Fifth Avenue, in particular, have a selection that rivals Palm Beach's Worth Avenue. The Mediterranean-styled Village at Venetian Bay overlooks the water and offers 50 boutiques to shop in. Tin City is a renovated section of Old Naples with a collection of 40 stores selling everything from anklets to toy zebras. A variety of merchandise can also be found at the Coastland Center on the Tamiami Trail and the Waterside Shops at Pelican Bay.
The Teddy Bear Museum displays more than 4,000 toy bears as well as a replica of the Three Bears' house and other bruin-related items. The Collier Automotive Museum has a sparkling collection of 75 classic sports cars from every decade of the 20th century. The Collier County Museum is devoted to the history of the local area and includes restored houses, a logging locomotive and a 1920s swamp buggy, as well as botanical and archaeological exhibits.
Because Naples sits near the western edge of the Everglades, it makes a good base for exploring some of this vast wetland. Also in the vicinity is the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, a huge preserve of virgin bald-cypress swamp where you can watch waterbirds from a boardwalk.
In Estero, north of Naples, is the Koreshan State Historic Site, one of the odder historic parks in the country. The site marks the place where a 19th-century religious leader founded a utopian community known as Koreshan Unity (no relation to the sect led by David Koresh in Waco, Texas). The group believed in both celibacy and world domination—the technical problems inherent in such a policy may have contributed to the sect's eventual demise. Today, 30 or so buildings document their grand scheme. Naples is 140 mi/225 km south of Tampa.
