The historic center of Naples bears witness to the historical and artistic evolution of the city, from its first Greek settlement in the 8th century BC along the area overlooking the sea,[2] the refounding of the same city in a more internal area, constituting the "ancient center", up to the Spanish Baroque city that saw the opening towards the west of the urban nucleus and to that center of the nineteenth-century cultural elite, with the flowering in the city of numerous noble and bourgeois villas that characterize the whole area of Posillipo and Vomero.