Amazing sights, sounds, and historical delights abound
Written: Jan 18 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Amazing beaches and wonderful photo opportunities everywhere
Cons: Somewhat overcrowded, and way too geared towards tourism.
The Bottom Line: Capri is a truly beautiful place to visit with some of the most amazing attractions, but is overcrowded by tourists.
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| biscuitfarmer's Full Review: Capri |
Capri has become one of the fastest growing tourist destinations in all of Italy. With some of the most breathtaking views, blended with wonderful culture, and history, it's not all that hard to understand why. I personally, found myself in Capri, during my 3 week long adventure around Italy with my long time Italian native friend Paoli and his wife, and of course, my wonderful wife. We came to Capri on a day trip in order to see the grandeur that my parents had explained while flipping through pictures in their last visit. My wife and I were extremely excited to see what Capri truly had to offer.
Safety
Capri is one of the safer locations in Italy. As it's on an island, it is pretty hard for thieves to escape the law in a hurry, so they seem to just avoid islands altogether.
Pretty much the most danger you'll see why on Capri would be from the wreckless drivers either on the way to your ferry or on the island itself.
What to bring
I always seem to tell everyone the same things to bring along with them. This time I'll keep it brief. Take sunglasses, a hat or visor, sun block, and bottled water. You should also make sure that you take along some sort of wallet that will strap to your chest, arms, or legs to protect it from pick pockets. I suggest leaving your valuables back at home, the hotel, wherever, and definitely bring along some form of translator or a Italian to English, English to Italian dictionary. While many people in Italy actually speak English already, there are a great deal that do not, so it doesn't hurt to have something to help you out somewhat.
Where to go and what to see
La Piazetta Clock Tower
One of the first sites that you will see getting off of the ferry, is the Piazetta clock tower. While it's not as impressive as many of the older towers in other towns, the time does work on this tower and architecture is fairly impressive. The small little town square is absolutely tiny however, and you are only going to want to take a quick picture and move along. You are literally surrounded by every tourist that just got off the ferry or is waiting to get on the next one, so it's an absolutely horrible place to stay for too long.
Santo Stefano Church
One of my favorite sights within the island of Capri is the Santo Stefano Church. The church, which is a fairly impressive monument, is a white washed, miracle of the 17th century. The best part about the church is that you can actually go up inside of it, and look out the windows at the port and the seemingly endless crowds of people. Unfortunately, you have to pay to get up there for this experience, but it's well worth it.
My wife and I had Paoli take a picture of us while we were up in the windows, getting a little kiss on. I really liked this area, so I made sure that we took a whole lot of pictures. The hard part was getting the plaques that tell about the church in the pictures. Unfortunately none of the descriptions of the church came out, like they have at most of my locations, but I still have the pictures of the church and the memories in my mind.
Again, Paoli, did his little prayer for the church thing that he does, and went through pretty much an entire roll of film capturing this monument. I think we got a picture of him from every angle here, even the one, where he had to adjust himself. That was an interesting phone call after he received the pictures. "You tooka piccha of me ascratcha in fronta tha chucha?" and of course that was followed by his always reliable "holly mi moley!" Apparently we are going to hell for capturing him scratching himself in front of a church. Our bad Paoli, we love you buddy!
Arco Naturale
This is a massive limestone cave. It's good for pictures, but I swear I heard bats coming from the area, so we didn't get all that close. Paoli decided to see if it would echo, so he yelled stupid Italian phrases as loud as possibly, and all he got back was his stupid Italian phrases. I wonder if that's what he wanted, because I was good the first time I heard it.
We did venture down a pretty good distance, and we could see some amazing views of the water. Of course we took a lot of pictures, however, it looked somewhat dangerous to continue down further towards the water, so we decided to back off and turn around somewhat. The nice thing is that we were away from the swarms of tourists at last.
Villa Jovis
This is a very cool place to visit. Buried up in Mount Tiberio, Villa Jovis is a village that was actually built around the first century, but wasn't found until only a few hundred years ago. The village, was actually built to be a fortress, as it was high enough above the island in order to see the water all around. This fortress was pretty impressive in that, it had a system where water was collected, and carried through tunnels for drinking, bathing, cooking, etc. They even had a method of heating the water for a more comfortable bath.
While Villa Jovis is pretty eroded away by this point in time, you can still see where a lot of the rooms were located. My wife and I had a blast in here, running around like we were a couple of kids. Well, that was until I tried to climb to the top of this one section and slid off, cutting my knee along one of the sharp ledges. Good thing I was wearing a sweat band, made a perfect wrap to cover up the war wounds.
We had packed some sandwiches for the trip, so we took the time to hide out in one of the covered sections of the Villa Jovis and ate some lunch, while looking out over the mountain. The area is pretty impressive as it's almost completely covered by trees, making it virtually invisible to invaders during it's time period. Which explains why it took so long before it was finally discovered.
Blue Grotto
This is one of the coolest places on the entire island, but the hardest to get to. We got ourselves a tour guide after hearing about this mysterious blue grotto. The guide brought us behind him in tour separate tiny rowboats. We arrived at what looked like a cave, with a very low entrance and we figured we'd just have to look at it from outside. Well, this guide suddenly ducked down, we did the same, and in we went. The cave entrance was so low, that I nearly bumped my chin trying to bend backwards to avoid it. Inside the blue grotto, is truly amazing. The entire inside of this caves reflects blue, thanks to another much larger tunnel that is completely submerged. Apparently the sun reflects through this larger tunnel, causing the light to give off a blue glue inside of the grotto.
There were actually quite a few people inside of the grotto, and we were all sort of clumsily bumping into each other, but it was all worth it. Unfortunately, none of our pictures of the inside of the grotto came out as good as I would have liked. We do have some that are pretty good, but they don't really show the true beauty of it. Oh well, maybe we'll remember that for our next visit to Italy.
Beaches
We actually took some time to stop by the many beaches on the isle of Capri to rest our feet in the water and to take some pictures. Unfortunately, hundreds of other people had the exact same idea. While these beaches aren't the standard ones that you would normally think about with sandy beaches, these beaches are pretty much where the water meets the walkway. There are stone platforms from which people lay out and relax or take a dive into the water, which is somewhat cold.
The water is extremely shallow quites a ways out on the island. And you can see all the way down to the bottom. I don't really remember seeing any sealife however, but that's probably because there are so many people that they were highly discouraged from coming too close to shore.
If nothing else, the beaches are a great place to take some pretty great pictures. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to take any real good pictures without getting someone's head or butt in the middle of it. Taking pictures of the shoreline was what I wanted to do the most, however, I didn't want the several hundred people in the picture. I took the picture anyway, but it has been rough trying to edit all of those bodies out of the picture, without taking away from it.
Where to shop
There's really only one great place to shop in my eyes in the area of Capri and that's right at the Port of Capri. Here there are loads of shops that are designed to serve tourists. If you are looking for a trinket, these shops have made sure that all they sell is trinkets.
Probably the best thing that I found in the shops, was the Lemon Liquor, which is extremely popular in this area. It's almost mandatory that you buy a bottle or two for the road, so we did.
Some of the shops, also had the standard tourist trap sort of items, like Isle of Capri snow globes and the like. Personally when I think of Italy, I don't really think of snow globes, but that's just me. Other stupid items that we found, were these collapsible architectural wonders things. They were pretty much just pieces of paper, that had little sliders on their base, where you'd slide them one way and you have an achitectural masterpiece and you slide them back the other and it's all in ruins. I guess this is fun for about a second or two, and then it's over. But obviously, tourists eat that stuff up.
Another thing that we found here, that we found fairly interesting, was a collection of coins from Italy. Each coin featured a different item that each major city in Italy is known for. About 60 total coins, pretty cool little collection. Of course, I bought this, even though it was something that only a tourist would buy and I'm ashamed for having the weakness, but it looks great in my display case. And a lot of people ask questions about it as well, since everything is written in Italian on the display box and on the coins.
Where to eat
The only place that we actually ate while in Capri was the Pizzeria Aumm Aumm. We had made Capri only a day trip, so we really didn't have much time for eating, besides the sandwiches and snacks that we had packed and eaten while visiting Villa Jovis. However, we decided that it was important to try some of the local cuisine before departing the island on the last ferry of the night.
Pizzeria Aumm Aumm has a large variety of pizzas and calzones, both American and Italian style. I personally, liked the Alfredo with seafood pizza, however my wife went with the more traditional pepperoni pizza, which she shared with Paoli and his wife. However, Paoli, did decide after a while, that he couldn't just let me eat my own personal pan pizza, so he took a chunk out of it just as I was about to throw in down my throat. Thanks to him, I still can't get the stains out of my shirt. It didn't help that he spilled wine on me, during the meal as well. Apparently Paoli was trying to tell me something about my style.
Where to sleep
We didn't actually stay the night in this area, so I couldn't exactly tell you where the best places to stay are. There are quite a few hotels in the area however, all of which have some pretty impressive views, and beautiful design on the outside of the buildings. I can only imagine what many of them look like from the inside.
How to get there
Capri is located on an island just off of the coast of Sorrento, yet another great Italian city. In order to get to Capri, you need to take a boat, hydrofoil, ferry, or something that goes across water, unless you really like swimming.
Final Thoughts
Capri is an absolutely wonderful place to visit, if you have the patience to deal with the crowds of people. While I generally don't do well with so many people, there are enough places on Capri where there are substantially less people, that it makes it a little bit easier to cope. Unfortunately, all of the great places to take pictures are totally filled with bodies, making it hard to get a good shot of anything.
While Capri would generally be a place that I would return to in a heartbeat, as it is absolutely amazing, the people make it somewhat difficult to bare. The food is absolutely wonderful and the shopping is extremely geared towards tourists, as are all of the amenities on the island, so it's very friendly to anyone that wants to visit on vacation. Just be prepared for large crowds
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Recommended:
Yes
Best Suited For: Couples
Best Time to Travel Here: Jun - Aug
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