This week’s dream: Capri free from the crowds

A know-it-all friend warned me that visiting Capri would make me never want to return home, said Rosemary McClure in the Los Angeles Times. Every summer, the two-mile-wide island off southern Italy is swarmed by nearly a quarter-million vacationers, all of them keenly aware that Jackie Onassis chose Capri for her honey­moon and that there’s always a chance of running into a Harrison Ford or a Julia Roberts. “But there is a way to avoid the madness”: In May or September, I was told, all of Capri feels like a “gracious Italian village.” When another friend said she was scheduling a May visit, I decided I had to test the know-it-all’s warning.

Approached from the water, the island is “a stark mass of limestone rising out of the Tyrrhenian Sea.” From the port, I take a train to hilltop Capri Town, where “the über-chic” sip limoncello poolside in their private villas. As I step off the train, I receive an unexpected welcome: I find myself in the middle of a wedding party, and someone hands me rice to throw at the bride and groom. Since cars are banned in town, I walk to Villa San Michele, which offers “spectacular panoramic views” of Mount Vesuvius. A chairlift ride to the summit of Mount Solaro affords views of the “island’s rural charm: sweetly scented lemon groves, sun-bleached stucco farmhouses, and banks of brilliantly colored bougainvillea.” Some visitors come to Capri just to commune with nature—often by walking stone pathways that are “marked by the wear of 2,000 years of foot traffic.”

I hop aboard a wooden boat to experience Capri by sea. Outside the Blue Grotto, a sea cave known for its “ethereal blue light,” the boatman instructs us to lie on the floorboards as we glide through the low entrance. Inside, we enter “a new dimension,” all made brilliant blue by a shaft of sunlight. The boatman sings an “echoing version” of “O sole mio” as I gaze into the cave’s silvery waters. When the boat exits and again is drifting under a blue sky, I begin dreading the thought of home.

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Doubles at the Hotel Punta Tragara (hotel​tragara.com) start at $559.