Capri

Top things to do in Capri

1. 01

   Grotta Azzurra - the sea cave that glows from below

   nature wildlife scenic 👍 Popular

   A cave on the north-west coast entered by transferring into a small rowing boat and lying flat to clear an opening barely a metre high. Inside, daylight comes in through a much larger submerged cavity beneath the entrance, the water filters out the red end of the spectrum and the whole chamber turns an electric blue. The Romans knew it and fitted it out as a nymphaeum - statues were recovered from the floor - and it was written back into fashion by two German visitors who swam in during the 1820s. It closes whenever there is swell or the tide is too high, the queue of boats can be long, and you are inside for a matter of minutes.

2. 02

   I Faraglioni - the three stacks off the southern cliffs

   scenic nature wildlife 👍 Popular

   Three limestone towers standing in deep water below Punta Tragara, the outer two detached from the island. The middle one is pierced by a sea arch that boats run through, and the furthest, Scopolo, carries a blue-tinted wall lizard found on that rock and almost nowhere else. The classic view is from the Belvedere di Tragara at the end of the town's clifftop promenade; the other one is from a boat looking up.

3. 03

   La Piazzetta - the square that is really an outdoor room

   culture arts food 👍 Popular

   Piazza Umberto I is barely bigger than a courtyard, roofed by nothing, floored in stone, and completely colonised by the tables of four competing cafes under a clock tower with the church of Santo Stefano up its steps. It has been called the drawing room of the world for about a century, which is either the charm or the problem depending on the hour. Go at breakfast or after ten at night; between the first and last boats it is a crush.

4. 04

   Monte Solaro - the single-seat chairlift to the summit

   scenic nature wildlife ⭐ Highly recommended

   From Piazza Vittoria in Anacapri an open one-person chairlift creaks up over walled gardens, vines and back terraces to the island's high point at around 589 m, roughly a quarter of an hour of dangling silence. The top gives you the whole bay at once: Vesuvius, the Sorrentine peninsula, the Amalfi coast round to the Gulf of Salerno, and on a clear day mountains far to the south. Walk down instead of riding back and the path drops past the ruined hermitage of Santa Maria a Cetrella on its ledge.

5. 05

   Arco Naturale, Matermania and the Pizzolungo path - the walk that empties out

   scenic adventure off beaten path ⭐ Highly recommended

   The best hour on the island and the one the day boats skip. Head east out of the town through the lanes to a huge natural arch of rock hanging over the sea, drop the long stone staircase below it to the Grotta di Matermania, a cave the Romans dressed as a shrine, then take the Via Pizzolungo, which contours the cliff face past the red modernist house on Punta Massullo with the wedge of steps for a roof, and comes out at the Faraglioni viewpoint. Steep in places, shadeless in the middle of the day, and almost empty.

6. 06

   Villa Jovis - Tiberius's palace on the eastern cliff

   history scenic

   About forty-five minutes uphill on foot from the square, through residential lanes and then open scrub, to the largest of the twelve villas the emperor is said to have built here. Tiberius ran the Roman Empire from this spot for the last decade of his life, and the ruin is terraced down the rock in several levels of cistern, bath and hall with the sea on three sides. Below it is the Salto di Tiberio, the drop that ancient gossip claims he used to dispose of people, and a small chapel sits at the top of the site.

7. 07

   Villa San Michele - Axel Munthe's house above the Phoenician Steps

   history culture arts scenic

   The Swedish doctor Axel Munthe built this on the ruins of a Roman villa at the top of the old stairway to Anacapri, filling it with columns, marbles and antiquities picked up on the island, and then wrote a book about it that sold everywhere. The set piece is the pergola walk ending at a parapet where a granite sphinx sits with its back to you, looking out over the whole bay. The garden, the chapel and the view make it the one indoor-outdoor sight on Capri that everyone agrees on.

8. 08

   Giardini di Augusto and Via Krupp - the terraces and the switchback

   scenic history

   Terraced gardens on the southern edge of town, laid out by a German steel magnate, looking one way at the Faraglioni and the other down onto Marina Piccola. Below them the Via Krupp folds back on itself down the cliff in a series of hairpins cut into the rock, a piece of engineering as much as a path. It has spent long stretches closed for rockfall, so treat it as a view to admire rather than a route you can count on.

9. 09

   Certosa di San Giacomo - the charterhouse that owned the island

   history culture arts

   A Carthusian monastery founded in the late fourteenth century, tucked below the town on the way to the gardens, with two cloisters, a whitewashed church and centuries of local resentment attached to it - the monks held much of Capri's land and water. Later it served as barracks and prison, and it now holds a museum of the huge symbolist canvases of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, the German painter who ended his life on the island in sandals and a robe.

10. 10

    Chiesa di San Michele Arcangelo - the majolica floor in Anacapri

    culture arts history

    A plain octagonal baroque church in the upper village whose entire floor is a hand-painted tiled scene of Adam and Eve being driven out of Paradise, laid in the mid-eighteenth century and crowded with animals, including a unicorn. You walk round the edge on a raised boardwalk so as not to tread on it, and climb to the organ loft to see the whole composition at once. Five minutes of your day and one of the odder things in southern Italy.

11. 11

    The giro dell'isola - the boat circuit of the cliffs

    scenic adventure

    Small wooden boats leave Marina Grande to run the whole coastline, which is the only way to understand a place that is essentially one continuous cliff. You pass under the arch in the middle Faraglione, look into the green and white grottoes on the south and west sides, round the lighthouse point and come back along the north coast. Most trips stop somewhere for a swim off the boat, and going late in the afternoon buys you flat light and far fewer hulls.

12. 12

    Marina Piccola - the south-facing coves and their bathing clubs

    scenic food

    The sheltered inlet under the Via Krupp cliffs, split in two by a rock the locals call the Sirens' stone and pointed straight at the Faraglioni. It is pebble rather than sand, and it works on the Italian lido model: platforms, ladders into deep water, loungers in rows, a couple of long-established clubs with restaurants attached. Afternoon shade arrives early because of the cliff behind, so mornings are the swim.

13. 13

    Bagni di Tiberio - swimming beside a drowned Roman villa

    history scenic

    A small shingle bay west of the port, reachable on foot in about half an hour or by the little shuttle boats from Marina Grande, with the broken walls of an imperial maritime villa lying half in the water at one end. It is calmer and cheaper in feel than the southern clubs, faces the bay and the mainland rather than the open sea, and gets a genuinely good sunset.

14. 14

    Punta Carena lighthouse and the Sentiero dei Fortini - the wild west end

    scenic history off beaten path

    The far south-west corner of Anacapri, where a lighthouse stands on bare rock above a bathing platform that is the island's sunset spot and the one place with a scruffier, more local feel. From near here the Sentiero dei Fortini runs north along the empty west coast, linking a string of small forts thrown up when the British and the French were fighting over the island, and finishes near the mouth of the sea cave. Exposed, rough underfoot in places, and the best half-day walk on Capri.

15. 15

    Scala Fenicia - the old stone stairway to Anacapri

    history adventure off beaten path

    Before a road was cut in the 1870s, the only link between the port and the upper village was this staircase of roughly nine hundred stone steps up the cliff face, carried by donkey or on foot with everything the village ate. Its Phoenician name is a nineteenth-century flourish; the cutting is far more likely Greek. Walking down it from Anacapri is the sane direction, takes about forty minutes, and drops you near the sphinx parapet on the way.

16. 16

    Via Camerelle and the sandal workshops - what Capri actually sells

    shopping culture arts

    The narrow lane running east from the square is one of the densest runs of luxury frontage anywhere for its length, and largely a spectacle. The thing worth buying is older than the labels: flat leather sandals cut and fitted to your foot in a handful of family workshops in the back lanes, a trade the 1950s film crowd made famous and which still works to measure while you wait. The other export is the lemon liqueur made from the outsized lemons grown on this coast.

17. 17

    Eating caprese on Capri - the salad, the ravioli and the cake

    food

    Three dishes carry the island's name and all three are worth ordering at the source. The salad is mozzarella, tomato and basil and nothing else, which exposes bad ingredients instantly. Ravioli capresi are little parcels of soft caciotta cheese and marjoram in a light tomato sauce, the genuinely local plate that visitors miss. Torta caprese is a dense flourless chocolate and almond cake, supposedly the result of a baker forgetting the flour. Walk uphill or inland away from the square and the cooking improves as the view gets worse.

Getting to & around Capri

Know before you go