Boutique and Luxury Hotels Capri

Capri is a four-square-mile slab of limestone rising sheer from the Bay of Naples — a separate trip from the mainland Amalfi Coast despite the visual similarity, with its own ferry connection from Sorrento and Naples and its own seasonal rhythm. The island has been a writer's island since Tiberius retired here in 27 AD and built the Villa Jovis on the eastern cliff. Augustus called it Apragopolis, the city of doing nothing. Norman Douglas, Compton Mackenzie, Rilke, Neruda and Graham Greene have all written from versions of the same terrace overlooking the same rocks.

The geography divides cleanly. Capri town sits in the saddle between the island's two limestone peaks — the Piazzetta with its four cafés, the funicular climbing up from the Marina Grande, the Via Camerelle and the Via Tragara running south to the cliff edge. Anacapri, on the upper plateau, is the older and quieter half — the Villa San Michele built by the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe, the chairlift to Monte Solaro, the white-washed houses of the Faro district. The Marina Piccola on the southern shore is the swimming bay; the Blue Grotto on the northwestern coast is the sea cave that travellers have been rowing into since the early nineteenth century. The Faraglioni — three limestone stacks rising directly from the sea off the eastern cliff — are the photograph everyone takes from the Punta Tragara overlook.

Hotel Punta Tragara sits on the eastern cliff directly above the Faraglioni, in a 1920s villa designed by Le Corbusier as a private house and used as Eisenhower and Churchill's headquarters during the Italian campaign of the Second World War. The cliff terrace looks south to the open Mediterranean. Monzù, the property's restaurant, holds one Michelin star.

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