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Capri: the Piazzetta, six o’clock on a balmy September evening. Four bars vie for custom on the world’s prettiest square. All the tables are packed, and the cream-jacketed young waiters have no time to snatch admiring glances at themselves in the mirrors. The last tourist crocodiles are waddling towards the funicolare, which will slide them gently down towards the port and Sorrentine oblivion. We survivors - the conspicuous aperitivo brigade - size each other up with bored curiosity.

They’re all here. The platinum blonde in the short white dress, hair trumped up, exchanging not a word with her sugar daddy, though she would give her right earring to speak to a friend in her own language right now. Two identically coiffed gentlemen in identical black t-shirts and linen jackets, one, on careful scrutiny, much younger than the other, who is feeding him olives. A solarium mother and her solarium daughter, discussing, with those chalk-on-the-blackboard vowels Milanese women specialise in, some property deal Gianni was supposed to have set up in New York. A table of four middle-aged Neapolitan men, puffing on big cigars with all the assurance of the beginner, while eyeing up the three unreachably teenage, unreachably American girls on the table next door.

There’s the old Capri hand, suffering from yacht fatigue, swarthy and ironic, wearing one of those knitted cotton hats that add a touch of Bohemia to the island’s elder statesmen. And there’s me, the writer with the laptop, wondering what a third dry martini would add to his prose style. There’s a woman I half know sitting in the bar opposite. She’s seen me too; but the Piazzetta encourages discreet anonymity. We agree to defer.



“Capri makes you forget everything,” said one illustrious visitor to the island in 1910. It was not Oscar Wilde, André Gide, or Rainer Maria Rilke, though they all came, saw, and waxed lyrical. It was Vladimir Illich Lenin, who was here in 1910, visiting his friend Maxim Gorky.

You have to struggle to forget everything on Capri today. The island is so utterly given up to tourism that it can seem like a bad limoncello trip on summer weekends. Between June and September, as many as fifty thousand tourists crowd onto the island each day - that’s five visitors for every resident. At peak times the main street - which leads between those two demi-monde landmarks, the Piazzetta and the Grand Hotel Quisisana - is shoulder-to-shoulder. A single untied shoelace, one feels, could provoke a major tragedy.

There are ways of avoiding the crush. As daytrippers outnumber hotel guests by ten to one, the first and best is to stay over. The second is to come early or late in the season: in April and early May, when the scents are at their headiest, or in early October, when the grapes have just been harvested and the sea is still warm enough to swim in. But even in high season there are quiet corners. If you take a morning bus from Anacapri to the lighthouse at Punta Carena, the southwest tip of the island, or climb up to the hermitage of Cetrella on the slopes of Monte Solaro, or even swim into the Blue Grotto after five in the afternoon, when the last of the daytrippers has been ferried back to port, you will have the place almost to yourself.

Even the Piazzetta heaves a great sigh of relief around aperitivo-time. No longer forced to do service as a pedestrian chicane, it becomes an open-air salon for the beau-monde - a transformation abetted by the strings of pretty coloured lights that stretch across the square. The night condenses around these electric stars, and life becomes a film.

Or a book, if you prefer. The island has always attracted writers, from Rilke to Norman Douglas, from Pablo Neruda to Compton Mackenzie. Some came for the inspirational crags; many more came for the inspirational young boys. The accretion of words and views which began with Suetonius’ muck-raking accounts of the Roman emperor Tiberius’ bad behaviour up at Villa Jovis has continued up to the present day. As contemporary Italian writer Stefano Malatesta observes, “a strata of erudition… covers the island. There is not a single beach, promontory, belvedere or ruin that does not teem with literature, from Augustus to Gorky”.

The island’s exclusive aura is carefully preserved by the local council. Municipal notices advise residents that “noisy machinery” can only be operated between the hours of 10am and 2pm. Motorised traffic is banned from the centre of town - all except for those little electric trolleys, each driven by a proud licensee, loaded down with luggage, copper pipes, the elderly and infirm, flowerpots and plaster busts of Tiberius. Painted ceramic tiles are used for all street names and house numbers - even for those mysterious little plaques that mean so much to the local electricity board, and so little to the rest of us. There are benches galore, and public phones in the most unlikely places - perfect for describing the view to overworked colleagues back home.



Around the island



There are only two reasons to be in Marina Grande. One is because you’re about to board a ferry - or one of the twenty-seater boats to the Blue Grotto that depart with production-line efficiency from the wooden quay opposite the tourist office. The second is because you’ve just got off one. In the latter case, shun the limoncello-from-hell attractions of the harbourfront souvenir shops and either head up the funicular (every 15 mins between 6.30 and 21.00) to Capri town, or catch the little orange bus to Anacapri. Those brightly-painted open-top bathtub taxis that ply for trade down by the port are fun to ride in but will not save any time: unless there is a long queue for the funicular, the latter is quicker, cheaper, and takes one nearer to the Piazzetta.

The Funicolare emerges at the far end of Via Roma - Capri town’s access road. At number 79, beyond the miniature bus terminus, is the sales outlet of the island’s original Limoncello factory (open daily 9.30-20.00). On the other side of the pretty belltower is the world’s most famous open-air living room - the Piazzetta.

Two scientifically proven General Laws relate to the Piazzetta. The first is that any lane you take in Capri town will eventually end up here. And the second is that, if you sit here for an hour, somebody you know will walk past.

But this absurdly picturesque square also poses our first major dilemma: which of the four bars to choose? Should one sit outside the Gran Caffé, with its cream-jacketed waiters and air of Maughamish aloofness? Or the Piccolo Bar opposite - the only one to have an upstairs tea room, complete with first-floor balcony for serious people-watching? Should it be the Bar Tiberio, which seems to attract a more bohemian crowd, and offers the best cocktail nibbles? Or the Caffé Caso, most characterless of the four, which for some reason seems to strike a chord with Anglo-Saxon visitors? In a couple of days, one can easily do the round of them all.

From the Piazzetta, Via Vittorio Emanuele leads down to the imposing Quisisana hotel (see below), past two important refuelling stops: the Buonocore pasticceria and ice-cream shop at no.35 (try their lemon-and-almond caprilù cakes) and the tiny Scialapopolo bar-gelateria at no.53, which has a small range of flavours, all of them excellent (purists should go for the vanilla). Via Camerelle on the left leads past a rash of elegant boutiques - with prices designed to challenge one’s credit limit - to the beginning of the Via Tragara. This quiet lane, bordered by a number of upmarket hotels, ends up at the Belvedere Tragara (just outside the Punta Tragara hotel), with its breathtaking view over the Faraglioni rockstacks.The walk between here and the Piazzetta is Capri’s most classic passeggiata.

Another equally pleasant walk leads down past the side of the Quisisana to the Certosa di San Giacomo, a semi-abandoned Medieval monastery set behind a lemon grove (now part of the extensive gardens of the Hotel Luna). Capri here shrugs off its worldliness and becomes rambling, almost rural - an effect enhanced by the unplastered walls of the convent buildings, the undulating simplicity of their cross-barrel roofs, and the huge unadorned cloisters - part of which now house the local secondary school. Up above are the Gardens of Augustus - a charming public park laid out on a series of terraces high above the sea, with views east to the Faraglioni and west to the horridly thrilling cliffs that loom over Marina Piccola - Capri’s tiny seaside resort, with its rows of bathing huts in Mondrian primary colours. The unfeasibly precarious path that winds between here and there with more hairpins than Ivan Trump is the Via Krupp, currently (autumn 1999) fixed up and open to walkers - all except for a brief passage where, taking a cue from the elderly capresi out for their Sunday stroll, you have to duck under a metal bar with a sign that warns of dire consequences for all who venture beyond.

There are two other classic excursions from Capri town. The first leads up the Via Tiberio to Villa Jovis, past the island’s prettiest church - the tiny chapel of San Michele, set back from the road in a small garden that cannot have changed much since the fourteenth century. Beyond here, the path dawdles up past imposing villas and more humble caprese dwellings until the houses thin out and the going gets steep. Tiberius didn’t have to walk of course; he was carried up to Villa Jovis (open 9am-6pm mid-May to mid-Sept; closing time gradually moves back to 2pm in winter) in a litter - whipping the slaves as he went, no doubt. Unfortunately, the rehabilitation of the Emperor who made Capri his base between 27 and 37 BC is threatening to turn the man into a mere superstition-ridden misanthropist, and not the cruel dissolute beloved of the tour guides. But the remains and the setting of his villa are impressive with or without the mental condiment of those who had fallen out of Tiberius’ favour being dashed onto the rocks below. Capri broke away from the Sorrentine peninsula at the end of the last Ice Age, taking tigers and rhinos with it; from here, Punta Campanella on the mainland is only a seagull’s glide away.

The other great Capri excursion is the walk to the Arco Naturale - a much-photographed natural arch that gives some idea of why so many Romantics panted Capri as a wild and unforgiving place (see, for example, the Gothick canvases by Diefenbach on display in the Certosa). From the Grottelle restaurant (a good place for a quick lunch, or a restorative caffé), a path descends to the cave known as the Grotta di Matromania - which may have been sacred to the goddess Cybele, or may simply have been an inspired bit of Roman landscape design. From here the path continues down a long flight of steps, along past the Faraglioni and back up to the Belvedere Tragara. The extraordinary red modernist house you pass along the way, isolated on a rocky spur above the sea, belonged to the Italo-German writer Curzio Malaparte, who was a kind of local Hemingway, only less talented and even more devoted to his own superman cult. As for the Faraglioni - impress your friends by informing them that the outermost stack is home to a species of blue lizard found nowhere else in the world.

Anacapri is Capri’s second town - the poor cousin, in most accounts. Partly this is because, with no natural harbour of its own, the town was always dependent on supplies from Marina Grande, which had to be carried up the steep rock-hewn staircase of the Scala Fenicia until 1874, when a road was finally built. But Anacapri was always the more rural of the two centres - a vocation underlined by the famous 18th-century maiolica floor in the church of San Michele (Nov-Mar 10am-3pm, Apr-Oct 9am-7pm), with its professional interest in the fauna of Eden. Today, it has less of the magic of Capri town but also less of the crush. It feels like a place where people live and get on with their lives - somewhere you could pick up a spare washer for the tap or a pound of potatoes. But it also has what is fast becoming the island’s luxury hotel of choice - the Palace.

The Villa San Michele (Nov-Feb 10.30am-3.30pm, Mar 9.30am-4.30pm, Apr 9.30am-5pm, May-Sept 9.30am-6pm, Oct 9.30am-5pm) on the other hand, is not somewhere we associate with washers or potatoes. Whether you consider Axel Munthe to be a saint or a fraud (in his essay “Self-Love Among the Ruins” - reprinted in the volume Anatomy of Restlessness - Bruce Chatwin veers towards the latter opinion), the villa and park that this Swedish doctor built on the site of one of Tiberius’ twelve villas is undeniably impressive. Even if you haven’t read Munthe’s splendidly anecdotal The Story of San Michele, this is a beautiful place to stroll for an hour. The villa itself is a hotchpotch of classical bits and bobs (“fragments of ancient marble… stuck into the walls like nuts in nougat”, as Chatwin puts it). But it is the gardens - and the views therefrom - that are the real joy.

Monte Solaro is one of those rare mountains that looks higher than it is. The chairlift from Anacapri takes twelve minutes to do the 300-metre ascent (Mar-Oct 9.30am-sunset, Nov-Feb 10.30am-3pm, closed Tue); alternatively, it’s an invigorating hour’s walk. Once over the pass of La Crocetta, the tilting plain of Anacapri is left behind and one enters a wild landscape of Mediterranean macchia ablaze with gorse. Most of Capri (“goat island”, acording to the most common etymology) must have looked like this at one time. The view from the top of the mountain is breathtaking. Just below the summit, in a ferny hollow, is the isolated hermitage of Santa Maria a Cetrella - a good spot for a picnic.

The Blue Grotto is Capri’s most famous sight, and the centre of a major business (those spruce footpaths and regular litter bins have to be paid for somehow, and 60% of the state tax on visitors to the Grotto stays on the island). The money, the postcards, the hoary old legend of its “accidental” discovery by a Polish artist called Kopisch - everything conspires to divert one’s attention from the Grotto itself. So it comes as a shock when, head ducked and eyes adjusted, the full translucent beauty of the blue comes through.

The most popular way to get there is to take a boat from Marina Grande (regular departures between 9am and 4.30pm). Outside the cave, in a scene that looks like a low-budget remake of Titanic, passengers are decanted into a flotilla of tiny three- or four-seater boats (L7,000, plus another L8,000 for the entrance ticket) which bob under the low rock lip of the entrance. The best time to visit is during the lunchtime lull, or else after five in the afternoon when the daytrippers have vanished (better still, swim in just before sunset). There are regular buses to the road just above the Grotto from Anacapri, opening up the possibility of a sea-and-land round trip - perhaps with a lunchtime stop at Add’ ’O Riccio.

This article originally appeared in Conde Nast Traveller (UK)

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