Inspiration: discover the Blog

Capri has been the object of intelligent desire for two thousand years. The limestone cliffs, the emerald water, the piazzetta at six in the evening: none of it disappoints. The question is only how to experience it with the access and the privacy that the island, at its best, actually offers.

Navigating the coast without the crowds — a working strategy for the most heavily visited weeks on the most heavily photographed coastline in Europe. There is a moment, around eleven in the morning on a Tuesday in mid-July, when the Piazzetta in Capri reaches its annual condition of structural impossibility. The funicular has just delivered another six hundred passengers from Marina Grande. The four cafés around the square are at capacity. The narrow shopping streets that rad

A seven-day Mediterranean passage at the season's first crest — the route, the anchorages, the meals taken on deck. There is a week most years, falling somewhere between the close of the Cannes Film Festival and the opening of the Monaco Grand Prix, when the western Mediterranean is at its most seductively underused. The boats are in the water. The harbour towns are open. The mistral has eased. The temperature is a perfect twenty-three by midday. And yet the heavy charter sea