Page 8 - DreamScapes Magazine | Winter 2023-2024

LITERARY MEDITERRANEAN
VISIT CAPRI
PHOTOS: CAPRI.COM
8 DREAMSCAPES WINTER 2023/2024
MUST DO
A visit to Villa San Michele, the former Anacapri home of Swedish physician, Axel Munthe. Friend of royalty and ras- cals (he famously hosted Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas after the couple was thrown out of the Hotel Quisisana). Munthe’s book The Story of San Michele (1929), was a best- seller and brought Capri’s charms to a global audience.
Like a Writer
BY J.R. PATTERSON
For thousands of years, Italy’s enchanting island of Capri has been a destination that has lured exiles and escapees, those seeking renewal and recovery, and has served as a playground for the rich and famous. You can thank the Roman emperors—famously Tiberius and Augustus— Capri’s first tourists who travelled seeking otium, or educated leisure—writing, swimming, eating and pursuing academics. It was a contemporary of those early Roman hedonists, Seneca the Younger, who said that, “Leisure without literature is death and burial for a living man.”
I was eager for my own dash of otium, and so set out for Capri to pursue the island’s literary heritage.
Here’s a Writer’s Guide to Capri:
Hidden Pleasures
On a crystal autumn day, Capri dominates the sky from the pier at Sorrento. This was far different from Charles Dickens’s first view of the isle. In his travelogue Pictures From Italy, it appears through a fog, “now close at hand, now far off, now unseen.” As the ferry approached, I knew the perfect weather couldn’t be wasted. I decide to walk from the western village of Anacapri, over the peaked crown of Monte Solaro, to the town of Capri, nestled in an earthly saddle.