Naval Support Activity Naples Italy Embroidered Patch – NSA Naples

Naval Support Activity Naples began on October 3, 1951, as Headquarters, Support Activities, a small shore command stood up to support NATO's Allied Forces Southern Europe. The Sixth Fleet came next, and the command grew with it. In November 1957 it became U.S. Naval Activities, Italy and U.S. Naval Support Activity, Naples, and the two were consolidated on August 8, 1966. Today the activity sits beside Naples International Airport at Capodichino and is home to U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa and the U.S. Sixth Fleet. For a sailor on a Mediterranean tour, Naples was where the fleet's business ashore got done.

Naval Hospital Naples opened at Agnano in 1967, the same year NSA Gaeta was established up the coast. In April 2003 the hospital moved to Gricignano di Aversa, and in 2005 the headquarters of U.S. Naval Forces Europe moved from London to Naples. Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station Naples, NCTS Naples, has operated there since the 1990s and keeps the circuits up for the fleet. On February 10, 2006, NSA Gaeta became a detachment of NSA Naples, bringing that waterfront under the same command. Ships of the Sixth Fleet working the Mediterranean have leaned on Naples for supply, communications and medical care since the early NATO years.

The patch is a 4 inch round with a black merrowed edge and a gold rope stitched just inside it. UNITED STATES NAVAL SUPPORT ACTIVITY arcs over the top in white letters on black, and NAPLES ITALY runs along the bottom between two white stars. At the center Mount Vesuvius rises green under a light blue sky, a plume of smoke drifting off the summit. Below it the field splits in two: on the left a winged lion with an open book marked PAX stands on red, the lion of St. Mark, and on the right an aircraft carrier rides on gold. Each panel is outlined in white, and the colors stand out sharply against the black ring. It has an iron-on backing and can also be sewn on.

A Naples tour meant working in a NATO city alongside Italian neighbors and allied staffs, with Vesuvius over the bay. Sailors stationed there kept the fleet's supply, communications, medical care and pay moving, work that rarely makes a cruise book but that every ship in the Mediterranean counted on. The command has carried that job for more than seventy years, from the early NATO years through the Cold War and into the operations that followed. For anyone who served at Capodichino, Agnano or Gricignano, the place names alone bring back the traffic, the food and the bay.

It fits a shadow box with your Sixth Fleet and ship patches, a photo from the Capodichino gate and a copy of your orders. It also makes a good gift for a sailor or Navy family who spent a tour in Naples. Vesuvius, the lion and the carrier, all in four inches.