🇮🇹 Italy · Southern Italy (Campania)
Capri is a luminous rock set in the Gulf of Naples, and for more than two thousand years it has exerted the same fascination: the emperor Tiberius ruled the Roman Empire from here, the Romantics of the 19th century turned it into a myth and the jet set of the 1950s and 1960s made it a byword for glamour. Cliffs dropping into the sea, water of an impossible blue, the Faraglioni rising out of the water, white lanes covered in bougainvillea and the legendary Piazzetta where the world sits to watch and be watched: Capri is pure postcard.
But it pays to arrive with clear ideas. It is a small island, very expensive and heavily crowded in summer, invaded every morning by thousands of day trippers who arrive by ferry, take the photo and leave. Its most famous attraction, the Blue Grotto, works in a peculiar way (a queue, a double payment, rowing boats and closure in rough seas) that disappoints anyone who does not know what to expect. And as for bringing a car, do not even try in season: it is banned for non-residents.
This guide explains how to get there and get around (everything by sea and then on foot, by funicular, bus or chairlift), how the Blue Grotto really works, what Villa San Michele, Monte Solaro or Villa Jovis cost, and why sleeping one night on the island — to experience it once the day trippers leave — completely changes the visit. With a plan, Capri is still one of the most beautiful places in the Mediterranean.
Inhabited since remote times and linked by legend to the Greek people of the Teleboi, Capri entered great history with Rome: the emperor Augustus fell in love with it and added it to his personal estate by swapping it with Naples for the island of Ischia; he called it Apragopolis, the city of sweet idleness. His successor, Tiberius, took the decisive step: he withdrew to Capri in AD 27 and governed the Roman Empire from the island until his death in 37, from the Villa Jovis. The ancient historians Suetonius and Tacitus built a dark legend of excess around those years that modern scholarship considers greatly exaggerated. After centuries of oblivion and pirate raids, Capri was 'rediscovered' by the Romantics: in 1826 the German painters August Kopisch and Ernst Fries made the Blue Grotto known to the world, and the island filled with artists, writers and eccentrics, from the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe (who built Villa San Michele) to the industrialist Krupp, and with illustrious guests such as Maxim Gorky and Lenin. In the 20th century it became the cradle of the 'jet set'. The full story, with Tiberius and the Romantic rediscovery, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The south of Magna Graecia and Vesuvius: Naples, capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; Pompeii, buried by the volcano; Amalfi, a maritime republic; Capri and a legendary coast, in the region marked by the southern question.
Read the history of Southern Italy (Campania) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it was a luxury, Capri was a Greek mystery. Inhabited as far back as prehistory, the island comes wrapped in legend: tradition links it to the Teleboi, a people from the coasts of Acarnania and the Ionian islands who, according to Virgil in the Aeneid, are said to have settled on Capri led by the mythical king Telon. What is certain is that in historical times the island had a Greek population and Greek customs — it depended on nearby Naples, itself a Greek colony — and even the name 'Capri' has been traced both to the Greek kapros (wild boar) and to the Latin capreae (goats).
The decisive turn came with Rome and with one man in particular: Gaius Octavius, the future emperor Augustus. According to Suetonius, Augustus was so taken with Capri that around 29 BC, on his way back from the East, he 'bought' it from the city of Naples, handing over in exchange the much larger and richer island of Ischia. It was an unequal swap in size but not in charm: Augustus turned Capri into his personal retreat, a place to rest far from the obligations of Rome.
The emperor himself, again according to the ancient sources, fondly named it Apragopolis, which can be translated as 'the city of sweetly doing nothing', of serene idleness. He had villas built, embellished the island and even collected the bones of prehistoric animals there — the so-called 'bones of giants' — in what is considered one of the first palaeontological cabinets in history. With Augustus, Capri entered for ever the imagination of imperial pleasure and repose.
If Augustus put Capri on the map, his successor tied it to history for ever. Tiberius, Rome's second emperor, took an extraordinary decision: in AD 27 he withdrew to Capri and never returned to Rome. From the island, over the last ten years of his life — until his death in AD 37 — he governed the entire Roman Empire, an empire stretching from Britain to the Euphrates. Never before or since had power over the Mediterranean world been exercised from such a small, remote place.
The reasons for the retreat were above all political and personal: Tiberius was a reserved, suspicious man, tired of the intrigues of the Roman court and obsessed with the fear of being murdered. Capri, ringed by sea and cliffs and practically impregnable, offered him safety and isolation. From there, through couriers and signals, he kept control of the state, while in Rome his fearsome prefect Sejanus built up dangerous power until Tiberius himself ordered his fall in 31.
The emperor filled the island with residences: Tacitus mentions twelve villas scattered across Capri, perhaps dedicated to the gods or to different uses. The largest and most important was the Villa Jovis, the 'Villa of Jupiter', a huge complex of almost 7,000 square metres perched on the north-eastern tip, looking out over a precipice more than 300 metres above the sea, with monumental cisterns, imperial apartments and reception rooms. Its ruins, still impressive, can be visited today after a walk from the Piazzetta, and they remain the most eloquent testimony to those years when Capri was, literally, the capital of the world.
Out of those ten years came one of the most famous dark legends of Antiquity. The Roman historians Suetonius, in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and Tacitus, in his Annals, painted Tiberius's Capri years as a descent into depravity: they described orgies, cruelties and perversions of every kind in the island's villas, presenting the emperor as a monstrous old man given over to the worst excesses. To that legend belongs Tiberius's Leap, the cliff beside the Villa Jovis from which, so the story goes, enemies and servants who had fallen from favour were thrown into the sea.
It is worth separating the historical fact from the myth, however. Most modern historians consider these accounts deeply exaggerated and, to a large extent, hostile propaganda. Neither Suetonius nor Tacitus witnessed any of it: they wrote decades later, in a political climate that scorned Tiberius's memory, and they collected rumours, court gossip and anecdotes designed to defame an unpopular, gloomy emperor little loved by the aristocracy. The real Tiberius was a competent and austere ruler, a careful administrator of state finances, rather than the degenerate of the chronicles.
That does not mean he was a kind man: he was hard, wary and capable of political cruelty, and his reign had its trials and executions. But the Capri of the orgies is, above all, literature. Telling the historical emperor — the one who governed effectively from an island — apart from the sinister character of the legend is part of the interest of visiting the Villa Jovis today: you tread a real place loaded with a myth that modern scholarship has taken apart.
After Tiberius's death, Capri lost its imperial role and entered a long decline. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the island followed the fate of southern Italy: it passed through Byzantine hands, came under the orbit of the duchy of Naples and the abbey of Montecassino, and suffered the swings of the Normans, Swabians, Angevins and Aragonese who fought over the kingdom.
Throughout the Middle Ages and much of the early modern period, the main concern of the people of Capri was not politics but survival. The Tyrrhenian coasts were ravaged by raids from Saracen and Barbary pirates from North Africa. Capri, exposed and hard to defend, was attacked and sacked several times; notorious corsairs such as Barbarossa and Dragut assaulted the island in the 16th century. To protect themselves, the population moved inland, away from the harbours, and watchtowers and fortifications went up, some still visible.
Life became humble and rural: vineyards, olive trees, fishing and little more. The old imperial island was reduced to a poor, forgotten corner of the kingdom of Naples, with two small towns — Capri and Anacapri — linked by a stairway carved into the rock, the Scala Fenicia. During the Napoleonic wars, in the early 19th century, Capri changed hands between the British and the French, who recognised its strategic value. But in general these were centuries of silence. Nobody imagined that this forgotten rock was about to dazzle the world again.
Capri's revival has a precise date and place: 1826, the Blue Grotto. That year the German painter and writer August Kopisch, together with his friend the artist Ernst Fries and with the help of a local fisherman, entered a sea cave that the islanders knew and even feared, and was dazzled by the marvel of blue light filling it. Years later, in 1838, Kopisch published an account of that 'discovery' that ran across Europe and fired the imagination of the Romantics, above all in Germany. Overnight, the forgotten island became a dream destination.
From then on, Capri filled with artists, writers, musicians and eccentrics of every kind, drawn by its beauty, its light and its free, tolerant atmosphere. One of the most singular figures was the Swedish doctor and writer Axel Munthe, who in the late 19th century built the Villa San Michele in Anacapri, on Roman ruins, a dream of columns, gardens and ancient sculptures that he immortalised in his book The Story of San Michele, one of the great publishing successes of the 20th century.
Others left their mark and a scandal behind. The German steel industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp, one of the richest men in Europe, fell in love with the island, funded excavations and works — among them the famous zigzag path of the Via Krupp — but left Capri amid a scandal over accusations about his private life. And on the political front, the island took in illustrious exiles: the Russian writer Maxim Gorky lived on Capri for several years and there received, in 1908, a visit from Vladimir Lenin, who spent the summer on the island and even played chess with Gorky in a now famous photograph. Capri had become a crossroads of European culture.
The 20th century made Capri one of the great symbols of world glamour. After the Second World War, and above all in the 1950s and 1960s, the island became the fashionable destination of international high society, film stars and European aristocracy. It is said, in fact, that the very concept of the 'jet set' was born on Capri: that elite who flew from one glamorous spot on the planet to another had the island as one of their obligatory stops.
The Piazzetta, that tiny rectangle with four cafés, became 'the drawing room of the world', the stage where actresses, tycoons, designers and musicians saw and were seen. Fashion owes it icons: capri pants (the three-quarter-length trousers) took their name from the island, and Capri's handmade sandals became an object of desire. Cinema, fashion photography and the gossip press spread the image of an island of luxury, sun and freedom all over the world.
Today Capri is still one of the most elegant and expensive destinations in Italy, and that same fame is its greatest challenge. In summer the island is overwhelmed by thousands of day trippers who arrive every morning by ferry, fill the Piazzetta and the Blue Grotto to bursting, and leave again at dusk; prices shoot up and the balance between tourism and local life is strained. And yet, when evening falls and the boats take the crowd away, when the light gilds the Faraglioni and the Piazzetta empties, Capri recovers intact the magic that enchanted Augustus, Tiberius, the Romantics and the jet set: that of a luminous rock in the middle of the sea that, for two thousand years, has gone on looking like a place too beautiful to be true.