Jamie Oliver's recent series in which he traveled around Italy hoping to rekindle his love of cooking showed just how chauvinistic the Italians are about their cuisine. Wherever you go in Italy the people for that region will claim that theirs is the one that has contributed most to Italian cuisine. However, the experts seem to agree that it is Naples and the Campania region in which it is found that has produced the best known Italian dishes which are now eaten all over the world. The colourful Inslata Caprese, Sorrento lemons which are made into the fabulous limoncello liqueur and the most highly regarded buffalo mozzarella all come from this region. However, it is pizza that is probably the most celebrated and best-known dish from Campania and it was first prepared at the Palazzo Reale di Capodimonte in the late nineteenth century by the chef Esposito.

On the surface, the only other restaurants in town were Chinese and neither of us are big fans of Chinese food but a stroll around the Piazza Amadeo area one afternoon unearthed La Cueva - an Argentinian restaurant tucked away just off a tiny square. We went in for a drink and found the staff friendly and welcoming; when a young guy came in trying to sell little animals and birds carved from wood they bought one from him and gave him a drink on the house. I can only think that in England they'd have turfed him out using a broom! We returned to eat the following evening - it happened to be the night of one of Italy's group matches in the European Championships.

The décor was semi-rustic, semi industrial. The uneven walls had been made to look like a wine cellar ("cueva" is, of course, the Italian word for wine cellar) and are painted a terrific burnt orange shade that worked beautifully with the modern wrought iron wall sculptures. The tables and chairs were a mixture of wooden and wrought iron. The lighting was subtle but good enough to see your food (why do many restaurants insist on turning the lights right down?). Generally it was a comfortable and attractive place to enjoy a meal.

We asked whether the restaurant had a house wine they could recommend and the barman dashed over holding a bottle on which the label bore a picture of the Argentinian footballer Maradonna. Maradonna is something of a hero in Naples because it was with his not inconsiderable input that Napoli won the Serie A title in 1987. It wasn't a house wine as such but one they recommended to most diners; we however decided that as staunch England supporters we could not let it pass our lips and opted for a reasonably priced Malbec Norton instead.

The dessert menu was short but seemed to include the usual sweet suspects of Italian cuisine - tiramisu, zabaglione and, of course, ice cream. Unfortunately, as is so often the case these days, my tiramisu was clearly a bought-in ready-made affair that I found a bit disappointing and the portion was rather mean. Maybe they were doing it for my own good, but I could have easily eaten a bit more.