The delights of this island have been obvious through the ages. Capri has known a cavalcade of the famous from Thomas Mann to Gracie Fields to Krupp, who manufactured guns for Germany. He studied the biology of the island (particularly lamprey larvae) and built a nice shady seaside walk to commemorate his sojourn, the Via Krupp. Perhaps the arms and the man were two different things.
Capri’s lotus-life so attracted the Emperor Tiberius that he made the island the capital of the Roman Empire between AD 27 and 37. His step-father had discovered it first and built no fewer than twelve sumptuous villas upon its balconied cliffs, among the olives and the ilex trees. According to the legend a dead ilex began to grow again when Augustus looked on it and this seemed a good portent and an excuse to establish himself there. He called the island Apragopolis, literally ‘A Place of Lazy People’. All the excesses of Rome were repeated there in Tiberius’s reign, including the tossing of human sacrifices over the huge cliffs. Part of the crazy Caligula’s childhood was spent on Capri with Emperor Tiberius in those wild and bloody days.
One of the villas built by Augustus, reduced to stones now with the roots of columns protruding from grass and flowers, is perched on the sheer and beautiful drop almost above the famous Blue Grotto. I wondered if the Romans knew the cave was there, right under their feet (it was not officially ‘discovered’ until 1826). It would be difficult to believe that they did not, for the low entrance is exposed on good sea days. Perhaps they used its eerie blue reflection as part of their odd ceremonies and enjoyments, although if they did they kept it a secret. It was the one place in Capri that remained inaccessible to me. During my visit the sea was always too heavy.
I went to the Villa Imperiale, above the Blue Grotto, in one of the entrancing taxis which wriggle around the narrow confines of Capri. Some are old and grand, saloon cars with wonderful descending convertible roofs like those of a large perambulator. My driver, Gerardo, was extremely proud of his vehicle, which was nearly new but just as picturesque as the others. He told me how much it cost and not only brushed the seat before I sat down but after I got up.
We left from the top of the abyss just outside Capri town where the motor vehicles have to stop. The island’s bright orange buses, crawling like ladybirds over the steep roads, also depart from here. In Capri every road seems to ascend. At once we began to climb and soon were circling like an open aircraft high and wonderfully above the town, looking down over the roofs among the trees, onto gardens and vineyards, and beyond to the Marina Grande, its splinter boats and the corrugated sea. Boats made seams across the bay of Naples, the island of Ischia looked content, and there were fluffy clouds over Mount Vesuvius.
It is at this point that the Phoenician Staircase, as the steps are called, the rocky ladder of 800 rungs rising from the harbour to the high streets of Anacapri, are incised at the side of the road. They drop sheerly down over the terrible rocks that go to the shore and rise high into the fir trees and cypresses collaring the heights that lead somewhere to the clouds and the second town. There is, naturally, some argument as to how many steps there are; the legends vary between 777 and 800. It is probably some time since anyone carefully counted them.
It was the centre of the day when we reached Anacapri and the air had warmed. The shy town, uncaring that the settlement on the lower slopes has taken all the glory, is touched with quiet beauty. Houses so mellow they look almost mouldy, clutter courtyards and alleys and the patterned streets. I sat under the vines in a café, drank the cool local wine, and watched the traffic which consisted of two schoolboys in smocks riding the same bicycle and a man solidly trundling a barrow upon which was a fat basket of olive oil.
Anacapri would be just that, another shaded, pretty town overlooking the Mediterranean, if it were not for one extraordinary thing. In the church of San Michele, an otherwise unremarkable eighteenth-century building, is the most amusing and amazing mosaic floor I have ever seen. The wonderful scene – the disgraced Adam and Eve being sent from the Garden of Eden – occupies the entire church floor so that the church is rarely used for services for fear that the feet of the worshippers would damage it. The visitor must creep carefully around the perimeter by means of a treadway, rather like going around an ornamental pond. The best way to observe the entire mosaic, however, is to mount the spiral stairs to the gallery of the church and look down on it in all its coloured wonder.
The tiles are the familiar shiny Mallolica squares; the colours browns, yellows and blues. Sturdy Adam and stocky Eve, the man already running, the woman, naturally, trying to have the last word with the banishing angel, are in the bottom right-hand corner of the scene. The angel sits on a small convenient cloud on the bank of Eden’s river. In the middle of the picture is the apple tree with the suitably smirking serpent curled around its trunk.
It is the supporting cast, all lovely animals, that give the picture its fascination and its fun. There are crinkly crocodiles and happy-looking bears, cats and idle dogs, a wandering white horse and a lost-looking elephant. A cat sits pleasantly beneath a camel, there is a griffon, and a beaming lion who appears to be eyeing a brace of chickens and considering lunch. On the water and in the trees are many birds. An eagle watches the scene haughtily and an owl squats in the plundered apple tree wearing an ‘I-told-you-so’ expression. In the sky the sun and all the stars shine together. You could gaze at it for hours and still find something new. If it were the only thing to see in Capri it would still be worth the journey.
A few streets and squares across the town is the villa where Axel Munthe, the great physician and benefactor, lived, and about which he wrote in his famous autobiography The Story of San Michele. He died in 1949 but the house with all the taste and treasures that were his is still kept as it was and is open daily. The people he cared for, and who loved him, look after it with a concern that indicates that the great man might at any moment return.
High above the villa and the town stands Monte Solaro, the highest viewpoint in Capri. The view is commanding in a place of outstanding scenery, but the reaching of it is just as worthwhile. You gain the summit by chairlift, a journey on looping cables slung up the side of the mountain which measures just under 2,000 feet. Sitting on an open, oddly childish seat, being whisked to that height was, I thought, only for the intrepid or the foolhardy. But old ladies do it and come down laughing, so I had to risk it. It is not as fearsome as it sounds for the passenger travels with idyllic lack of speed up the green and gradual slopes, never being more than twenty feet above somebody’s roof, vineyard or market garden.
At the bottom end of the cable I bought a return ticket. (Single tickets are available, but how do you get down again?) The attendant instructs you to place your feet on two foot-shapes on the floor and you stand there, feeling mildly foolish, watching the chairs swaying down the mountain towards you and the explorer in front of you being transported on his uphill journey. You study the arriving passengers’ faces for signs of terror or relief. There are none. They smile smug smiles that say, ‘There’s nothing to it really.’
The attendant detaches the passenger as he or she arrives back to earth and they leave the chair with a brief run. Then it swings the corner and comes towards you. The drill is brisk and easy (if you don’t panic). The chair curls around the bend and you wait, knees slightly bent, like a skier, so that it catches you and drops you into a sitting position, and away you go. Clipping the fragile bar across your middle, you find yourself being eased aloft at a lullaby speed. You pass an ominous and, for me, unnecessary notice which says, ‘Don’t Swing’. You look up and examine the single cable upon whch you ride: it bumps disconcertingly over the wheels on the pylons spaced at yawning intervals up the mountainside. But it looks as though it might hold. Below, the earth is sliding away. The streets and roofs of Anacapri fan out, the sea is silver. Rocks and gorges change form as you travel. You suspect that you are going to enjoy it.
Despite the widespread view, the real fascination is nearer, more intimate, r
ight beneath your travelling feet: all the way up the terraced slopes are olive groves, vineyards and crowded vegetable patches. There are small horticultural houses almost hidden in vines, and as you dangle past the windows you can see the people inside. It must be very odd sitting there and watching a foreign pair of legs go by every twenty seconds. I tried waving with my foot as I progressed but there was no reaction. They must be used to it by now.
The other pastime, during the twelve minutes to the summit, is observing the people coming down. It is strangely embarrassing to pass a stranger in mid-air; it’s difficult to know how or whether to make a greeting.
Some people stare setly ahead. The British and the Japanese are good at this. Others give a small yawing smile and perhaps add a wave, and you, of course, return the courtesy. The embarrassments come into view as they descend towards you. Some summon up a laugh or a comment, although conversation is, of course, limited. Some people play jokes. As I went by one jolly chap called, ‘I knew your father!’ Before I could question him he had gone forever.
After twelve varied minutes, during which you have seen the beautiful island from a series of unique angles and met twenty or thirty new people, you reach the flattened pate of Monte Solaro. As the cable levels and you run in towards the disembarking point an attendant stands, legs astride, hand thrust out as though ready to shake yours. It is both a greeting and a release for he tugs you clear of the chair and you are there. If the passenger is a pretty girl he grabs her with both hands. It is one of the perks of the job.
At the top the scene is so lavish you have to laugh. Warmth and loveliness spread themselves from your toes to the edge of the world. Misted mountains, brilliant sea; islands, headland, roofs and sky, near and distant. It is almost too extravagant. The man who runs the café at the top is used to it all. He goes to work every morning on the chair lift and returns home by it at night. No rush-hour for him. I asked for a glass of wine but he said he could only provide me with a whole bottle. I hesitated and glanced over the parapet to the dizzy descent of the cable. I decided to have a small beer instead.
Capri is a small place and it is the small things that remain with the traveller; two men tuning the organ in the old and broken charterhouse of La Certosa while the woman caretaker went out on the ramparts to watch the sunset. It was not poetry which took her there, but duty and punctuality. She had to lock the place at sunset and when the last red bar of the sun had gone below the sea that is what she did, locked up.
In the unending entertainment of the main square of Capri town, that small theatre, there occurs a regular moment of comedy. There is only one public convenience. The key is kept behind one of the bars and the needy have to request its use. It is attached to a chain and, so that it never gets mislaid, on the end of the chain is a hefty rubber ball, larger than a tennis ball. Some people transport it with some attempt at secrecy and decorum across the crowded square; others, with bravado, swing the ball and chain as they go.
One morning I was sitting on the flowered and urned terrace of the Piazzetta watching the track of the great hydrofoil that journeys between Naples and Salerno. It stood out like a racing liner across the bay. (The Italians, with that blissful touch they have with names, call it Il Jumbo del Mare – The Sea Elephant.) A group of American tourists approached and one pair, a man and wife, rounded, elderly, their faces as bright as their clothes, detached themselves to take yet another photograph. The man posed against the beautiful background while his wife fiddled with the camera.
‘Do you want the ocean or the mountains behind you?’ she demanded.
‘Just make it good,’ he shouted back. ‘This one is for my girlfriend.’
She saw me laughing. ‘Listen,’ she confided, ‘we been married forty-two years. If he can get a girlfriend at his age then he’s better than I think.’
She took the pictures. He returned and they laughed. Then he put his arm around her, hers went about him, and, embraced, they waddled tubbily away. All at once I, the lone traveller, felt very solitary. And I realized one last important thing about Capri. It is a place to be with someone you love.
CAPRI situated latitude 40°33’N and longitude 14°15’E; area 4 sq. m (10 sq. km); population approx. 12,000; Italy
Corfu
The Green Eye of Greece
. . . the splendour of olive grove and orange garden, the blue of sky and ivory of church and chapel . . .
EDWARD LEAR on Corfu
At 4.30 in the morning the plane flew in from the west, between dark-shouldered mountains, over the sleeping bay, its lights blazing as it approached the airport, making its own moonlight on the water.
It is said about Corfu – an island like a green eye in the blue Ionian Sea – that you only have to look around and you will see some new beauty. This was mine; a different time, a different viewpoint, standing on my balcony watching the approach of the pre-dawn aircraft. Previously it had seemed to me a great shame that the only possible way by air into this lofty and lovely place was over a land-and-seascape so tranquil that even the wings of a bird would disturb it. Throughout the day, fortunately in the autumn at wide intervals, the noisy planes arrived, flattening out over the lambent bay with its two islets, Vlacherna and Pondikonisi, and roared gutturally onto the runway. It seemed a poor return for centuries of stillness and beauty. But, in the early dark hours, it was different. The plane added something new to the wonders of this place and I had made safe my individual moment of memory.
The two little isles below the balustrades of Kanoni just south of Corfu Town, must be among the most painted and photographed places in the world (to which I added my own dozen or so optimistic frames) and there can be no angle left that will lend a new view. The second islet floats like a dream out in the limp water, a few fingers of cypress, a white tower showing above them; the first is not really an island at all for it can be reached by a stone causeway alongside which the Corfiot fishermen potter in their boats.
It was, in the latter days of the British Protectorate in the 1860s, a favourite promenade for society – a ‘walk to the One Gun’ it was called, for here was a cannon placed by the French during their occupation. The artillery is long gone, but the walk remains satisfying, out to the isle with its miniature convent and single cypress, where birds sing in the stillness. In order to keep faith with the name of the place, Kanoni, the Corfiots later placed another ‘One Gun’ overlooking the bay, a Russian artillery piece which is still there, looking a little out of place among the parked cars.
The elegant people’s Sunday walk was an aspect of the careful structure of Corfu’s society for centuries. When the Serene Republic of Venice held sway over the island the names of the local worthies were entered in Golden Books. These were publicly burned when the French arrived, but they built an arcade in Corfu Town which became known as the Liston, the place where only the best people – those on ‘The List’ – were permitted to perambulate. Today’s society is a good deal more dispersed and gregarious, but it still enjoys the shade and elegance of the Liston, its arches and iron lamps modelled on the rue de Rivoli in Paris, sitting, watching, drinking, talking, and forever calling waiters whose names always seem to be Spiro.
This is scarcely an exaggeration for sixty per cent of all Corfu’s boys are christened Spiro, and eighty per cent of the waiters have this name. In one restaurant I know, everyone is a Spiro!
They take their name from the island’s blessed overseer, St Spiridon, who through plague, storm and battle, has lent protection to his trusting people. He lies in a silver coffin in his red-topped church in Corfu Town (‘St Spiridon is in there,’ the caretaker, collecting candle-ends and pointing to a side chapel, told me in the manner of a butler confirming that His Lordship is at home.) At Easter, and on other feast days, St Spiridon is taken from the coffin and paraded around the town so the people can view him.
Over the years the relic of the saint has become a little ragged perhaps, but the people still love him dearly, and he has not let
them down. Apart from his deliverances from pestilence and soldiery, he once appeared in an olive grove and advised a farmer not to prune the olive trees in the traditional way but to let them grow, to desist from beating the trees (it hurt them, he said), and wait until the fruit fell to the ground. Corfu is the only place in Greece where this method is carried out. Travelling through the countryside you see nets beneath the trees ready to catch the fruit – the finest in the Mediterranean. There are three million unruly olive trees in Corfu, some of them still giving fruit after five hundred years.
When the mummy of St Spiridon arrived in Corfu from Cyprus in 1456 (he had then been dead a thousand years) it was transported in a bag on the back of a donkey, along with the headless remains of St Theodora, by a Greek saint-dealer called Kalokheretes. There is a story that St Theodora’s head had been sold in Rome. Both saints are still on the island, the lady is allowed to rest peacefully at Mitropoli, the Orthodox cathedral, but St Spiridon receives visitors daily and is still very much at the heart of the people.
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Corfu Town – known as Kerkira to the Greeks – is like a well-loaded cheese board. Its old buildings, yellow, cream, peach, orange and white, pile one on the other. They open out into random balconied squares and unofficial alleys, and broaden into a mellow tapestry that can be best viewed from the Citadel, the great abandoned hump of a fortress that overlooks the sea.
My World of Islands Page 16