TEMPUS Magazine redefines time, giving you a glimpse into all things sophisticated, compelling, vibrant, with its pages reflecting the style, luxury and beauty of the world in which we live. A quarterly publication for private aviation enthusiasts.
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The island's frst tourists were the Romans, who were attracted by its ravishing scenery and its aura of refnement as a former Greek colony. During the second century B.C., the entire Bay of Naples blossomed into a seaside resort. Roman aristocrats, including the emperor Augustus himself, would sail to Capri to escape the summer heat and to indulge in otium, or educated leisure—working out, swimming, dining and discussing philosophy. In this Hamptons of antiquity, Roman girls cavorted on the pebbly beach in prototype bikinis made from fne goatskin. But the fgure who most thoroughly shaped Capri's fate was Augustus's successor, the emperor Tiberius. In A.D. 26, at the age of sixty-eight, Tiberius moved to Capri to govern the enormous Roman empire from his dozen villas here. For a decade, according to his biographer, Suetonius, Tiberius wallowed in hedonism—decorating his mountaintop Villa Jovis, or Villa of Jupiter, with pornographic paintings and statues, staging orgies with young boys and girls and torturing his enemies. (The ruins of the villa still exist; its tunnels, arches, and broken cisterns crown the island's eastern cliffs, from which the emperor was said to have tossed those who displeased him to their deaths.) In recent years, many historians have discounted Suetonius's depiction, which was written some eight decades after Tiberius's death. Yet the image of the emperor's carnal indulgences became a fxture of Capri's reputation, repeated as gospel and perpetuated in Robert Graves's historical novel I, Claudius and in the lurid 1979 flm Caligula, starring a haggard-looking Peter O'Toole as the imperious reprobate. But if Tiberius lent the island a dreadful notoriety, he also guaranteed its popularity. Its divine beauty would forever be inseparable from its reputation as a sensual playground, where the pursuit of pleasure could be indulged far from prying eyes. Capri saw a surge of popularity in the 1750s, when excavations in Pompeii, the Roman town buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, made Naples a key stop on the Grand Tour. Travelers, including the Marquis de Sade, in 1776, added Capri to their itineraries. (He set a part of his licentious novel Juliette at the Villa Jovis.) The "discovery" of a natural wonder, the Grotta 66 Tempus-Magazine.com . Summer 2013 Azzurra, or Blue Grotto, only boosted the island's appeal. In 1826, August Kopisch, a young German writer touring Italy, heard rumors of a sea cave feared by local fshermen. He persuaded some boatmen to take him there. After swimming through a small opening in the rocks at the base of a towering cliff, Kopisch found himself in a large cavern where the water glowed, he would write, "like the light of a blue fame." Further inspection revealed the source of the light: an underwater cavity that allows sunlight to flter in. Kopisch also found an ancient landing in the back of the grotto; islanders told him it had once been the entrance to a secret tunnel that led to one of Tiberius's palaces, the Villa Damecuta, directly above. Kopisch described his explorations in Discovery of the Blue Grotto on the Isle of Capri, which tapped into the Romantic era's interest in the spiritual and healing powers of nature. Soon travelers were arriving from around Europe to revel in natural beauty and escape conventional society. At the time, Capri had fewer than two thousand inhabitants, whose traditional rural life, punctuated by religious feasts and the grape harvest, added to the island's allure. Affuent foreigners could rent dirt-cheap rooms, dine under vine-covered pergolas, and discuss art over light Caprese wine. In the village cafés, one might spot Friedrich Nietzsche, André Gide, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, or Ivan Turgenev, who raved about Capri as "the incarnation of beauty." One visitor, a poetic Swedish doctor, Axel Munthe, became so enamored of the island that he built the magnifcent Villa San Michele on the crest of a hill with stunning views of the Mediterranean. He flled the villa's lush, secluded gardens with Roman statues, a stone sphinx, and a carved Medusa head, which had to be carried up the eight hundred or so steps from the harbor by mule. His memoir, The Story of San Michele (1929), was translated into forty-fve languages and carried the island's charms to a new audience. Today, the Villa San Michele is a Swedish cultural center and remains, in Henry James's words, "a creation of the most fantastic beauty, poetry, and inutility that I have ever seen clustered together." Somerset Maugham, another regular visitor, captured the dark side of the expat dream in his short story "The Lotus Eater," about a British bank man-