Capri like a fair maiden who must be wooed if her full charm is to be enjoyed.
There is a certain coyness about her, an aloofness which withdraws her from the grasp of the impatient. The winds and the waves which are seldom still around her rocks, guard her from the importunate mob.
True, thousands of tourists visit her shores every season; but the majority of those do not even land except at the Blue Grotto, photo below, and as they roll back to Naples on the Mediterranean swell, they are apt to think unkindly thoughts of that fair Siren rock which had lured them to such a fate!
The few, however, who refuse to be content with aim hour’s interview, but persist in their attentions: who settle down and fall in love with the beauty and the mystery of this elusive island, begin to discover her secret.
She exerts an almost uncanny fascination on her lovers. Once their eyes have been opened to the slender grace of her rocky sides, so tall, so straight: to the wonderful colours of her clinging garments, as from her clefts like a cascade the fragile campanula streams forth and clothes her with stars of pale amethyst, and mingles with another stream of sapphire blue lithospermum or white and purple convolvulus they become bewitched with her beauty.
They laugh at such Italian rivals as Portofino, Positano, Porto Cervo or even Cortina d’Ampezzo.
The former has certainly the azure sea, and the latter the impressive cliffs; but Capri has both combined. It is a mountain station and a seaside resort: and the air, how shall we describe it? Like fine old wine it has substance, and another quality which we can only call intoxication.
Indeed, the air may be accountable for many strange things which take place on what one writer has called “The Crazy Island.”
The first breath of this air which I inhaled was at Massalubrense on the mainland.
An account of this should really belong to my last chapter, but if it has stumbled into this, put it down to the craziness which infects Capri.
Stranger things will be recounted before the present chapter is finished. From Sorrento we drive to Massalubrense and from there up to St. Agatha, and climb to the monastery at Deserto.
The view of the two gulfs is, of course, magnificent, but what impresses one most, is the change in the air. In Sorrento it was heavy and hot; yet on those heights, even though it be midsummer, there is a freshness and tonic in the breeze that makes one take the steep ascent with a light step.
From the monks’ platform we look across to Capri, and the island wafts its kiss to us in that cooling breeze. One is not surprised to find at Masaalubrense a military sanatorium.
A better spot there could not he for such an institution.
Yet that air is but a foretaste of the real thing. These words are written in Capri in the beginning of August. Possibly it is a sweltering day in London. Here the thermometer may register in the sun eighty-five degrees but there is a delightful westerly breeze fanning my cheeks, and there is such a buoyancy in the air that one could walk up to Anacapri, which is 1000 feet, with oven a lighter step than to Deserto.
Capri is an island in which you never grow tired, and I would almost be inclined to add-never grow old.
Some of the most important Hotels in Capri and Anacapri:
JW Marriott Capri Tiberio
J.K. Place Capri
Caesar Augustus
Hotel Punta Tragara
Villa Marina Capri Hotel & Spa
Some of the most famous Restaurants in Capri:
Aurora
Faraglioni
L’Olivo
Portofino World, a world apart.
