NAPLES — The city of Naples awarded its highest civic honour to Trudie Styler on July 2, 2026, when Mayor Gaetano Manfredi presented the actress, producer and director with the City Medal of Naples, a distinction the city council gives to individuals who have brought positive attention to Naples on the world stage.

“The City Medal is fitting recognition for a truly great international artist,” Manfredi said. “Trudie Styler made a documentary about Naples that represents, with great love and professionalism, the spirit of this city and shows its uniqueness.”

A civic honour

The medal recognises “Posso Entrare? An Ode to Naples,” Styler’s documentary that follows the city’s streets and residents, revealing what organisers describe as its complexity and vitality, its light and its shadow. The film won the Golden Globe, an Italian cinema prize awarded at the Rome Film Festival and unrelated to the Hollywood ceremony of the same name.

Styler, who has lived in Tuscany with her husband, the musician Sting, for nearly thirty years, said she arrived in Naples without preconceptions.

“I must admit, to my embarrassment, that although I know many parts of Italy, having worked in Rome, at the Cinecitta film studios, as an actress in the 1980s, and knowing Tuscany well, where Sting and I have a vineyard and where one of our children was born, I had never visited Naples,” Styler said. “So when I was asked about making a documentary, I arrived with a blank canvas.”

In the Sanita district, a historic Naples neighbourhood known for its community projects, Styler met Don Antonio Loffredo, a priest credited with reviving the area.

City officials said the medal fits into a wider municipal strategy to celebrate cultural figures who help shift international perceptions of Naples, a city long associated by outsiders with crime and disorder rather than its layered history, warmth and creative energy.

“Everything I was anxious or worried about disappeared,” Styler said. “People began welcoming me as a treasured guest. I have never experienced a stronger sense of community anywhere in the world.”

Manfredi said the award reflects a broader civic effort to celebrate artists who portray Naples with nuance rather than stereotype, adding that the city hopes the documentary will encourage a fresh, more contemporary understanding of Naples among international audiences. Officials said the film will screen at cultural centres across Naples in the coming months.