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In most of the world, scheduling a concert for 6:00 a.m. would be eccentric, to say the least. Add that the venue is a clif-side grotto reachable only by a half-hour hike, and it sounds almost perverse. Not so on Capri, the idyllic island in Italy's Gulf of Naples whose natural beauty has drawn gatherings since Roman times. As tuxedoed waiters closed down the last cafés at 5:30 a.m., I accompanied an elderly Italian couple dressed as if for the opera through dark, empty plazas in the island's town center, also called Capri Town. We came to a cobbled footpath that led to the grotto, turned on our fashlights, and made our way past moonlit lemon groves and gated villas. It was a velvety summer night, and my new companions, Franco and Mariella Pisa, told me they divided their time between Naples and Capri, much as their parents and grandparents had done before them. "Capri has changed on the surface," Mariella said, "but its essence remains the same." Finally, after negotiating a series of steep stone steps down the side of a cliff, we arrived at the candlelit Matermania Grotto, a cavern half open to the sky, where traces of an ancient Roman shrine are still visible. In antiquity, this had been a nymphaeum, or shrine to water nymphs, decorated with marble statues and glass mosaics, artifcial pools and seashells. As candlelight danced on cavern walls, immaculately dressed Italians—bronzed gents in white silk trousers, women in sequined dresses, some carrying tiny canines—took their seats on rocks around its entrance. The group swelled to about a hundred. The starlit sky had just begun to lighten when the sound of bells tinkled through the grotto and a lone cellist launched into a discordant experimental piece. In the predawn light, I could see that the cave opened out upon the jagged eastern coastline, where sheer cliffs and spires plunge into the Mediterranean— "galloping rocks" that provide "exclusive balconies for elegant suicides," the Italian futurist poet F. T. Marinetti wrote in the 1920s. No wonder the ancients regarded Capri as the domain of the sirens, those Homeric creatures who lured sailors to their demise with seductive songs. As the sun began to rise, hundreds of birds began to chatter in the surrounding trees, and the guests were then offered a suitably pagan repast of fresh green grapes, bread, and milk. In the early 1900s, expatriate bohemians gathered in the Matermania Grotto for faux-pagan celebrations of a more bacchanalian nature. One in particular has gone down in legend. In 1910, Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen, an opium-addicted French novelist and poet (whose neoclassical Villa Lysis attracts tourists today), staged a human sacrifce to the ancient Roman sun god Mithras. While a crowd of friends in Roman tunics held torches, burned incense, and sang hymns, d'Adelswärd-Fersen dressed as Caesar, pretended to plunge a dagger into the chest of his naked lover, Nino Cesarini, cutting him slightly. A young shepherdess who witnessed the pageant told a local priest about it. In the ensuing scandal, d'Adelswärd-Fersen was forced to leave the island—albeit briefy—one of the few cases on record of Capriotes' being outraged by anything. For more than two thousand years, this speck in the Gulf of Naples, only four miles long and two miles wide, has been known for its dazzling beauty and extreme tolerance. Writers, artists, and musicians have long been drawn to its shores. "Capri has always existed as un mondo a parte, a world apart," said Ausilia Veneruso, the organizer of the Matermania Grotto event. "It is the hermaphrodite island, a collision of mountains and sea, where opposites thrive and every political ideology and sexual preference fnds a place."