This Gorgeous Island Is One of the Best Italian Summer Destinations — With 2 New Luxury Hotels and Great Crowd-free Activities

Italy's Capri is stunning but packed in the summer. An Italy-based travel writer gives us a closer look at the best things to do to avoid the crowds, including boat tours, private lunches with notable chefs, and checking out the new luxury hotel talent.

It was during an afternoon spent relaxing over a leisurely lunch, sunbathing, and swimming in the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean at Da Gioia, the beach club by Hotel La Palma, that I began to understand why some people return to Capri year after year. My husband, Marco, and I had traveled to Capri once before from our home in Rome, but that was a shoulder season trip, so this was our first taste of summer on the island. And we learned that you can indeed have a quintessential dolce vita experience in Capri, if you can manage to avoid the crowds.

Before the pandemic, Capri welcomed around 2.3 million tourists per year, with the vast majority visiting during the summer months. And though the pandemic temporarily gave the island a reprieve from the crowds, they’re back, making it hard to navigate the island during the day. As Marco and I learned, the best way to experience Capri without the crowds is to walk around in the early morning or in the late afternoon and evening, and spend the peak hours (from around 10 a.m. until 5 p.m.) on the beach or at sea. But the most surefire way to have a fabulous experience in Capri is to choose your hotel wisely.

We checked into Hotel La Palma — the highly anticipated new hotel from the Oetker Collection — and couldn’t have been happier. Housed in Capri’s first hotel, built in 1822 as Locanda Pagano, the property opened on June 1 following a top-to-bottom renovation by acclaimed designer Francis Sultana. Just a stone’s throw from the island's famous Piazzetta, it’s got everyone on the island buzzing. With 50 rooms and suites, two restaurants and bars by chef Gennaro Esposito, a luxurious spa with products by Santa Maria Novella, an outdoor pool flanked by aquamarine-and-white-striped lounge chairs and umbrellas overlooking the town, and the aforementioned beach club in Marina Piccola, La Palma certainly checks all the boxes.

The hotel’s opening marks Oetker Collection’s entry into Italy (the brand is best known for its legendary properties like Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera, Le Bristol in Paris, the Lanesborough in London, and Eden Rock in St. Barths) as well as London-based designer Francis Sultana’s debut hotel project. Sultana, who lives between London and Malta, usually designs private residences, and he has brought his artful touch and keen eye for detail to La Palma, outfitting the lobby with pieces from his Marie-François collection and designing every detail, right down to the bespoke taps featuring a palm tree in the bathrooms.

What really stands out, though, is the friendly and accommodating service. We loved dinner at Gennaro’s Restaurant — where we tried some of the chef’s signature dishes like zucchini tartare with dried-fruit mayonnaise and zucchini-flower chips and sole meunière served with a side of sautéed escarole with olives and anchovies. But we also appreciated that the bar manager let us order a burger and club sandwich off-menu the next evening, since we had already eaten pasta for lunch at the beach club.

The next day, after a lunch of caprese salad, fritto misto, lobster linguini, and lemon sorbet, we sauntered down to the lounge chairs (reserved exclusively for guests of La Palma) to relax on the beach with views of the Faraglioni, the iconic sea stacks jutting out of the water. The adjacent patch of free beach was packed with people, but luckily, we didn’t have to search for a place to lay our towels. It wasn’t easy to tear ourselves away from the beach club, but we returned for a late afternoon walking tour of the island with a local guide.

Roberta, born and raised on Capri, led us away from the busy streets surrounding the Piazzetta and brought us to the picturesque Giardini di Augusto, where we admired the beautiful flowers and statues and gazed down at Via Krupp, the pedestrian pathway carved into the side of the cliffs by German industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp in the early 1900s. She showed us the workshop where Carthusia — which has shops all over the island — makes perfumes and other skin care products. And she led us to Anacapri, the town on the other side of the island, to show us the island’s more laid-back side. “It’s nice to walk around Capri now, after the day-trippers have left,” she told us.

It was a refrain repeated by Federico Alvarez de Toledo, the proprietor of the concept shop Eco Capri, which sells chic caftans, swimwear, cushions, and other luxury goods. When I stopped by Eco Capri one morning, Alvarez de Toledo showed me some of the beautiful new pieces in the shop and confirmed what I suspected: that the Capri habitués avoid the center of town during the day, when it becomes overrun by day-trippers. For him, the sweet spot of the day is the late afternoon hours when people return from the beach and stop by to shop before freshening up for dinner.

On our last full day on the island, we discovered the best way to avoid the crowds and see the island’s natural beauty: circumnavigate it by boat. When planning the trip, I had contacted one of my most trusted tour operators, Fulvio de Bonis, co-founder of Imago Artis Travel. He arranged for us to hop aboard a boat for a private tour of Capri’s grottoes with a guide named Fausto, who was full of entertaining stories. We paused to gaze at the people waiting for hours to get into the famed Blue Grotto. Instead, we sailed over to a secluded grotto and dove into the sea. As we sailed around the island, Fausto pointed out sights like the lighthouse, the exclusive beach club La Fontelina, and Villa Malaparte, a feat of rationalist architecture where Jean-Luc Godard filmed Le Mépris starring Brigitte Bardot.

Back on land, Fausto accompanied us to the Villa San Michele, a museum inside the historic home of Swedish doctor Axel Munthe, whose collection of art and antiquities is displayed in the villa and gardens. He brought us to the panoramic viewpoint, guarded over by a sphinx, and instructed us to tap the left side of its rear end with our right hands for good luck. After, we stopped by the tranquil garden where husband-and-wife team Holly Star and Gianluca D’Esposito, who once owned a restaurant on the island, now teach cooking classes and gelato workshops and host private lunches and dinners They’re planning to open a bigger garden on a patch of land overlooking the water next year, offering visitors a way to immerse themselves in the island’s nature and cuisine.

For our final night on the island, we moved to Il Capri, which officially opened in March in a neo-Gothic pink palazzo a couple of blocks from the Piazzetta. Created by husband-and-wife team Graziella Buontempo and Arnaud Lacombe (she’s Neapolitan, he’s Parisian), the 21-room hotel offers a more laid-back and affordable alternative to La Palma and the island’s other pricey hotels. The vibe is youthful and homey, with bamboo and wicker furniture, family photos, and artwork from Buontempo’s personal collection. After freshening up, we headed up to the rooftop restaurant Vesuvio for eggplant parmigiana and ravioli caprese with fantastic views. I only wish we had more time to enjoy the rooftop pool.

Now that we know how to avoid the summer crowds in Capri, I have a feeling that we’ll be back around this time next year. Who knows? Perhaps the sphinx will bring us good luck and let us join the island’s habitués.

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