Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I had with me two incredibly useless guidebooks to Italy, so useless in fact that I'm not even going to
dignify them by revealing their titles here, except to say that one of them should have been called
Let's Go
Get Another Guidebook
and the other was Fodor's (I was lying a moment ago) and neither of them so much
as hinted that Capri town was miles away up a vertical mountainside. They both made it sound as if all you
had to do was spring off the ferry and there you were. But from the quayside Capri town looked to be
somewhere up in the clouds.
The funicolare up the mountainside wasn't running. (Natch.) I looked around for a bus or a taxi or even a
donkey, but there was nothing, so I turned with a practised sigh and began the long trek up. It was a taxing
climb, mollified by some attractive villas and sea views. The road snaked up the mountain in a series of
long, lazy S-bends, but a mile or so along some steep and twisting steps had been hewn out of the
undergrowth and they appeared to offer a more direct, if rather more precipitate, route to Capri town. I
ventured up them. I have never seen such endless steps. They just went on and on. They were closed in by
the whitewashed walls of villas on both sides and overhung by tumbling fragrant shrubs - highly fetching, but
after about the three-hundredth step I was gasping and sweating so much that the beauty was entirely lost
on me.
Because of the irregular geography of the hillside, it always looked as if the summit might be just
ahead, but then I would round a turning to be confronted by another expanse of steps and yet another
receding view of the town. I stumbled on, reeling from wall to wall, gasping and wheezing, shedding saliva,
watched with solemn interest by three women in black coming down the steps with the day's shopping. The
only thing sustaining me was the thought that clearly I was going to be the only person tenacious enough to
make the climb to Capri. Whatever lay up there was going to be mine, all mine. Eventually the houses grew
closer together until they were interconnected, like blocks of Lego, and the steps became a series of steep
cobbled alleyways. I passed beneath an arch and stepped out into one of the loveliest squares I have ever
seen. It was packed with German and Japanese tourists. The tears streamed down my cheeks.
I got a room in the Hotel Capri. 'Great name! How long did it take you to come up with it?' I asked the
manager, but he just gave me that look of studied disdain that European hotel managers reserve for
American tourists and other insects. I don't know why he was so snooty because it wasn't a great hotel. It
didn't even have a bellboy, so the manager had to show me to my room himself, though he left me to deal
with my baggage. We went up a grand staircase, where two workmen were busy dribbling a nice shade of
ochre on the marble steps and occasionally putting some of it on the wall, to a tiny room on the third floor. As
he was the manager, I wasn't sure whether to give him a tip, as I would a bellboy, or whether this would be
an insult to his lofty position. In the event, I settled on what I thought was an intelligent compromise. I tipped
him, but I made it a very small tip. He looked at it as if I had dropped a ball of lint into his palm, leading me to
conclude that perhaps I had misjudged the situation. 'Maybe you'll laugh at my jokes next time,' I remarked
cheerfully, under my breath, as I shut the door on him.
Capri town was gorgeous, an infinitely charming little place of villas and tiny lemon groves and long
views across the bay to Naples and Vesuvius. The heart of the town was a small square, the Piazza
Umberto I, lined with cream-coloured buildings and filled with tables and wicker chairs from the caf￩s
ranged around it. At one end, up some wide steps, stood an old church, dignified and white, and at the other
was a railinged terrace with an open view to the sea far below.
I cannot recall a more beguiling place for walking. The town consisted almost entirely of a complex
network of white-walled lanes and passageways, many of them barely wider than your shoulders, and all of
them interconnected in a wonderfully bewildering fashion, so that I would constantly find myself returning
unexpectedly to a spot I had departed from in an opposing direction ten minutes before. Every few yards an
iron gate would be set in the wall and through it I could glimpse a white cottage in a jungle of flowery shrubs
and, usually, a quarry-tiled terrace over-looking the sea. Every few yards a cross-passageway would plunge
off down the hillside or a set of steps would climb half-way to the clouds to a scattering of villas high above. I
wanted every house I saw.
There were no roads at all, apart from the one leading from the harbour to the town and onward to
Anacapri, on the far side of the island. Everywhere else had to be got to on foot, often after an arduous trek.
Capri must be the worst place in the world to be a washing-machine delivery man.
