When the honeymoon comes before the wedding, location is everything.
Robert S. Boynton discovers Capri’s garden of earthly delights

In good postmodern fashion (and for mundane reasons of scheduling), my fiancee, Helen, and I decided to take our honeymoon before our wedding. Deciding where to go proved trickier. A lifelong New Yorker, I wanted to escape cities; Helen had her heart set on a cosmopolitan destination with all the comforts of home. When she suggested we “compromise” and go to the glamorous Italian island of Capri, I sensed our first full-fledged tiff. I failed to see how my desire for raw, natural beauty would be satisfied by a chic isle where I suspected Prada boutiques outnumbered pine trees by a wide margin. Helen, who had been to Capri several times before, would hear none of my whining. “It has everything,” she assured me. As usual, she was right.

Although only a half-hour hydrofoil ride from Naples, Capri is a world unto itself: a magical place with all the elements—absurdly stunning vistas, excellent food, inexpensive wine, clement weather, and gracious natives—that have lured visitors to Italy from time immemorial. The Roman emperor Augustus well understood its rocky charms when he traded it for the much larger, more fertile island of lschia in 29 B.C. Capri’s fame soared in A.D. 27 when Tiberius chose it over Rome as the seat of his empire. His legendary orgies, as well as the scores of elaborate villas he built, established the island’s reputation as a place of hedonism and excess—a tradition upheld by generations of expatriate writers (Graham Greene, D. H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas) and, more recently, the European jet set, which has made Capri its playground.

What I had failed to understand is that the tiny two-by-four-mile island actually holds two very different towns: the Capri of crowded medieval streets, swanky hotels, and the scantily dad superrich, and the far quieter village of Anacapri (literally “over Capri”), where sprawling vineyards and lush, tree-lined paths offer a more modest version of Eden. The dramatic contrast hit me the moment we disembarked from the hydrofoil at the Marina Grande. On the left, I saw the gleaming white and yellow hotels clustered around Capri’s enchanting Piazza Umberto, beckoning with a promise of genteel luxury. To the right, I spied the road to Anacapri, a craggy vein of steep switchbacks from which you can survey the entire Bay of Naples. If Capri is the coddled eldest sibling, Anacapri is the slightly rakish youngest son: a bit off the beaten path, on the far side of Mount Solaro, tucked beneath the verdant hills that roll down toward the sea.

Fortunately, cars are restricted to permanent residents (they are banned entirely from the streets of the main town), as the Italian penchant for reckless driving is only somewhat curtailed by Capri’s terrifyingly narrow roads. The best way to full into the island’s rhythm is to walk everywhere—a form of transport made all the more attractive by the endless stretches of meandering paths flanked by fragrant aleppo pines and bright purple bougainvillea. For the first few days, I tried to keep track of our posirion as we wandered through the maze of crisscrossing streets. But soon, only the most basic temporal coordinates (“Hmm … Sun overhead. Time for lunch”) resisted Capri’s somnolent pace. Sometimes we gave up moving entirely, preferring to make an extended study of the homemade fig gelato at Anacapri’s Bar Grotta Azzurra, or to lounge in the cafe of Capri’s Grand Hotel Quisisana ( where Giorgio Armani keeps a suite) sipping the house cocktail, a refreshing blue concoction made from lemon, gin, blue curacao, and Cointreau.

On a more ambitious day, we found that one of the island’s most beautiful walks begins only a few hundred yards from Piazza Umberto. The first leg goes out past the elegant boutiques of the Via Camerelle and the discreet ivy-covered hotels of the Via Tragara to the Belvedere, a perch with the best view of the Faraglione—three pointed rocks that shoot up several hundred feet from the ocean. From there, the path narrowed, clinging to the side of limestone cliffs that plunged five hundred feet straight down. The route was rocky and unpaved, which didn’t discourage the party behind us from tackling it in stiletto heels. After exploring the remains of the Grotto di Matromania, a series of cavernous Roman sanctuaries that some historians claim was the site of Tiberius’s most debauched rituals, we made our way down through a cool pine forest and emerged into the blazing sun at Punta di Massullo. We paused for a long water break before attempting the last hundred yards: a set of stairs that headed—more or less—straight up. At the top, we were greeted by the matronly owner of the Trattoria Le Grottelle, who ushered us to a table right on the edge of the precipice, where” stunning ocean views, a plate of crisp alici fritte (fried sardines), ,rnd a bottle of the local Tiberio white wine revived us.

Every sensible Caprese has a favorite “beach”—which are actually smooth rock ledges jutting out into the ocean—where a reclining chair can be rented for a few thousand lire for the day. While the island breeze cools you off by night, the hot summer days require periodic plunges into the fluorescent sapphire-blue waters (a color that results from light reflected off the island’s limestone base). The beach we chose was near the famed Grotta Azrurra on the northwest side of the island, just down the hill from the small house we rented. The Blue Grotto is the tourist attraction that put Capri on the map in the late nineteenth century, and there are two ways to experience it: During the day you can fork over 15,000 lire (plus a “voluntary” 10,000 lire tip) to be rowed into the grotto for five minutes or so. Or you can swim in yourself in the early evening once the tourist operation closes down, as I did. With only a few fisherman looking on, I plunged into the water, squirmed through the V-shaped rock opening, and found myself floating completely alone in the glowing blue water, the only sound the gentle lapping of waves echoing off the cave walls. As I paddled around, I imagined the grotto thousands of years ago when it was used by the Romans as a quasi-religious site. It was like being at the heart of Eden.

Our nearby beach was attached to a little thatched-roof restaurant run by Giovanni, a charming painter whose pasta e ceci (made from a small chick peas found only on Capri) and insalata caprese (basil, tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella) became the staple of our lunches. After several pleasant afternoons at Giovanni’s, there were few meals where a bottle of wine wasn’t thrown in or our check wasn’t trimmed to a fraction of its actual cost. On slow afternoons, the owner showed off pictures of his two daughters and young Swedish girlfriend, or, when pressed, his paintings of Capri’s coast. “The light here is like nowhere else in the world,” he said. “It more than makes up for my dark winters in Stockholm.”

Our sojourn in paradise much diminished my initial anxiety about getting married. But before I relinquished the last vestiges of singledom, we attended a traditional Italian wedding. Only a few weeks before, Helen’s best friend had announced she was going to get married in her hometown of Capri and asked us to extend our stay. So on a late summer afternoon, a small crowd stood in the main piazza while the mayor officiated over a civil ceremony. Like a scene from an Italian movie, gorgeous women and handsome men threw rice, air-kissed, and clinked champagne glasses. Then, as the couple promenaded out of city hall, the entire piazza cheered and the bells pealed for ten minutes straight. As the couple made their way through the piazza, I felt as if the bells were ringing for us as well. It had been a wonderful honeymoon and now it was time to get married.