CAPRI

(Capri is more than an island in southern Italy, it is a symbolic construction of a solar, sensual, and intellectual Europe. Located in the Gulf of Naples, near Naples, the island has, over the centuries, become a territory of convergence between dramatic nature, luxury, art, and cultural dissent.

The landscape is Capri’s first cultural gesture. Monumental rocks, an almost unreal blue sea, grottos, and cliffs create a natural aesthetic that has shaped the island’s sensibility. The famous Grotta Azzurra transforms light into spectacle, as if nature itself were staging a permanent installation of color and silence. In Capri, geography is already performance.

Historically, the island was a refuge for the emperor Tiberius, who built villas there and consolidated Capri’s image as a space of power, isolation, and excess. Centuries later, the same island would become a haven for European artists, writers, and intellectuals in search of moral and aesthetic freedom. Capri came to symbolize escape, experimentation, and cosmopolitanism.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the island gained fame as a territory of voluntary exile for figures fleeing the rigid norms of their home societies. A culture marked by bohemianism, veiled or explicit homoeroticism, artistic debate, and outdoor living flourished there. Capri became a stage where identities could be reinvented under the Mediterranean sun.

Fashion also found on the island a laboratory of style. Handmade sandals, light fabrics, dominant whites, oversized sunglasses, and relaxed elegance created what would later be called the Caprese style. It is not merely clothing, it is a bodily attitude. Dressing in Capri dialogues with climate, light, and the island’s slower rhythm. Body and landscape enter into agreement.

In the postwar period, Capri consolidated itself as an international luxury destination. Film celebrities, aristocrats, and fashion creators frequented its narrow streets and historic cafés, reinforcing the image of Mediterranean glamour. Yet behind the tourist showcase, there remains a local culture connected to fishing, simple cuisine, and popular Italian religiosity.

The culture of Capri is made of layers. Roman Empire, intellectual refuge, queer paradise, fashion showcase, and global tourist destination coexist within the same territory. The island functions as a metaphor for Europe itself: ancient and contemporary, classical and hedonistic, disciplined and excessive.

In Capri, the landscape educates the eye and the body. Culture is not only found in museums or historic villas, but in the way one walks up the hills, in the stretched time of a seaside coffee, in the awareness that there the setting is as much a protagonist as those who inhabit it.)