Lady’s Guide to One Day in Capri

Today I want to share my guide to spending one day in Capri, Italy. With its reputation as a jet-setting destination, its stunning rows of luxury goods shops with white awnings, and its dramatic natural scenery, this island in the Bay of Naples is a tiny Mediterranean paradise.

One Day in Capri

I first wanted to go to Capri after my cousin, who studied architectural history in college, made a model of a bright pink villa built into a huge cliff in Capri for the Modern Architecture class we took together.

I, as a second-semester senior slacker with a job offer in hand, took the class pass/fail. Instead of a model, I wrote a paper on Czech Cubist architecture.

She won. And her model won me over to the idea of visiting Capri. I wanted to travel to this enchanting rugged isle with its pink jeweled houses and steep sea cliffs.

Things to Do in Capri

Years later, I finally got the chance to spend one day in Capri. On our first full day on the Amalfi Coast, my boyfriend and I took a ferry from Sorrento to Capri to see what the island had to offer.

After exploring the waterfront area with its rows of small blue-and-yellow boats, we took the funicular up to the top of the cliffs. High above reality, we found ourselves in a luxury-goods fantasy land.

The town of Capri is a spectacular sight. Not only does it offer beautiful views of the sea, but also of that subset of people that takes its Hermes seriously.

Long rows of white awnings run down small sunny streets while red geraniums mark the entrances to Capri’s many luxury hotels and resorts.

Add to that the vertigo I felt every time I looked down to the water, and it made for a very surreal experience.

Farther down the path, a beautiful public garden boasted of a plethora of purple pansies and bright-eyed daisies, not to mention cliff-edge lookout points on the top of Capri’s cactus-lined coastal bluffs.

After exploring the town for a while, we continued our one day in Capri by returning to the main square to get some lunch.

While we ate our panini at Bar Tiberio, we noticed that almost everyone else in the restaurant—and all the neighboring restaurants, for that matter—was enjoying a lunch of the liquid variety.

It then made sense that our generously-proportioned panini cost only six euros apiece while my boyfriend’s small bottle of Peroni cost nine.

After lunch our one day in Capri took us to the island’s other main town, Anacapri (they’re so creative with their names).

We hopped on the world’s tiniest bus, which looked like a bright orange box. Its stylishness paled exceedingly in comparison with the sparkling-white convertible taxis nearby, but at least it got us to Anacapri.

As I shut my eyes while the driver careened around the winding cliff-side roads on the ten-minute journey, I began to wonder again if the otherworldliness of the day was due to vertigo.

Anacapri is about as different from neighboring Capri as can be in a ten-minute drive. While Capri was all glamor and see-and-be-seen, Anacapri was much more relaxed and down-to-earth.

It even had its own rustic ski-style chairlift to take people to the top of the cliffs.

We spent an hour of our one day in Capri enjoying the relative calm in Anacapri, strolling down the narrow streets and up the green hills before going back to the marina to catch our ferry to Sorrento.

We had a bit of spare time when we got there, so we took a walk along the harbor to check out the yachts and other assorted seafaring vessels. I got sidetracked by an adorable puppy, but I do recall some pretty impressive boats.

One Day in Capri, Italy

When our one day in Capri was over, we got back on the ferry to Sorrento.

Passing the short ride in admiration of the views of Mount Vesuvius, I couldn’t help but feel a little pang of regret for not trying to track down the pink house from my cousin’s cliff-top model.

Then again, finding the reality might have ruined the enchantment of the tiny isle in the sea. And we wouldn’t want to spoil paradise.

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