Capri
Capri doesn’t merely welcome you, it remembers your flavor—like a lover who feasts on your rakishly disreputable indiscretions, keeping delicately ruinous confidences—and cellars the velvety vintage to pair with it. This is more than a postcard paradise, it’s a stage, and Capri never breaks character, even when you do. Arriving at Hotel La Palma—the island’s oldest hotel built in 1822, reborn in 2025 as Oetker’s first Italian Masterpiece—feels like slipping into a heightened sensual parallel of your life. Everything slows, oddly familiar, like a song you never learned but somehow know by heart.
Far from the swirl of selfie sticks and day-trippers at Marina Grande, step inside to vaulted ceilings flickering with frescoes by Roberto Ruspoli, pale cabanas arranged like thrones around a pool—every line softened, every surface infused with designer Francis Sultana’s homage to 1950s Capri. La Palma’s managing director, Imelda Shllaku, tells us, “Our welcome is stylish but never stiff, relaxed yet refined, like the island itself. We want guests to feel instantly part of something timeless and a little theatrical—that’s the real spirit of Capri.”
La Palma’s rooms drip with gravitas, think old money and good taste with the sly confidence of an oligarch who’s had both for centuries. Balconies scented by gardenia; dove-white walls interrupted only by flickers of turquoise and brass fittings. Bathrooms gleam in art-deco marble and chrome—a tactile caress against both fatigue and flashiness. At Gennaro’s on property, lunch arrives encore after encore: zucchini blossoms fried impossibly crisp, lobster pasta steamed with citrus salt, aubergine parmigiana with a seriously smoky bite. Each plate sun-charged, earthy, and typhoon-fresh—served with a view over glittering Marina Piccola. Sunbathe at La Palma’s Da Gioia Beach Club, watching motorboats scalloping past in a shimmering symposium. Afternoon light sharpens, the sound of laughter bobbing across the water: lovers debating lunch, locals in linen trailing perfume and politics, tiny boats tethered like toys to the dock.
By evening, buzzy new rooftop Bianca Carne & Crudo sparks to life, the scent of jasmine threading the air like scintillating gossip. Truffle pizzas glint like tentacled art, and the horizon pulses where terracotta rooftops meet molten sea. The cocktail list? Inspired by Neapolitan cinema classics. “Naples is not just a city—it’s a living soul made of imagery, sound, and timeless stories,” La Palma’s food and beverage director Dario Gentile declares. “Each cocktail is crafted as a tribute to a piece of this identity: a cult film, an iconic scene, or a melody that has echoed across the world. The result captures the spirit of a poetic, visceral, elegant, and proudly popular Parthenopean tradition, where every sip evokes a story.”
Ten minutes down to the coast, J.K. Place Capri sits tucked above Marina Grande, in a restored 19th-century villa once owned by American sisters. Twenty-two rooms only—eight suites—Florentine antiques, magnum monographs, and classical busts mingle with flair. It’s the chic of refined eccentricity, and in 2025 La Liste crowned it one of the world’s top-ten hotels. Staff greet you like kin; the energy is warm, Italian hospitality refined into gestures that glow. General manager Vanessa Giovanelli muses, “Here, time shifts from something measured to something felt. We don’t slow our guests down; we surround them with grace until they pause on their own.”
At J.K. Place Capri, some suites look onto both poolscape and Vesuvius—the sleeping volcano, framed by pale sky and distant heat. Breakfast arrives in artful baskets—feather light pastry, smoked mozzarella, almond-cream olio, fresh-pressed juice—each bite rooted in Campanian terroir. Chef Davide Brustenga observes, “There is a kind of light in Capri that doesn’t just illuminate ingredients, it transforms them and so does the air of Vesuvius. I don’t aim to overpower them with technique. I try to listen, to let their sunlit voices speak clearly on the plate.”
J.K. Capri is intimacy incarnate, a hideaway where restraint itself is luxury. La Palma is the isle’s social soul: audience to past artists, romantic jet-set lineage, its kaleidoscope of evenings at Bianca. The Talented Mr. Ripley-esque time on your hands? Ink in a week at both—one sociable, one secretive—for the best of both auras. The heart of Capri doesn’t beat—it lounges. La Palma sits in the center of it like a cat in a sunbeam, a few lazy paces from the famous Piazzetta where time has the decency to stall. From here, reality frays at the edges: La Certosa waits behind old stone and older silence; and the Faraglioni—those jagged, god-placed sentinels—stand eternal, doing nothing, saying everything.
Amalfi
While Capri seduces, Amalfi confesses. Halfway up a cliffside, in a former 13th-century Capuchin monastery thick with lore and lemon oil, Anantara Convento di Amalfi Grand Hotel, once seen, will endlessly linger somewhere behind your eyes—half-remembered, half-invented. The original Arab-Norman cloister, Baroque sacristy and Chapel of San Francesco remain intact, as do their spiritual integrity amid Anantara’s sleek updates.
At 52 rooms, it’s less a hotel than a cloister repurposed for the sensually literate. Each a relic of asceticism turned artful retreat—some with private balconies overlooking Amalfi Bay. Once monastic cells, now transmuted into contemplative retreats with modern comforts and citrusy spa oils sourced from the hotel’s own lemon groves. The infinity pool is cut dramatically into the cliff, embraced by olive trees, providing the kind of void-staring experience usually reserved for existential crises. No cruise-boat racket; the sea is hushed, panoramic, lulling. Service is warm, irrepressibly Italian. Many staff pre-date the Anantara takeover, lending continuity with the flair of a Fellini walk-on.
along Italy’s Amalfi Coast
(Nicolas Quiniou)
The Amalfi Coast, with its aching beauty and lemon-laced air, hums at a different frequency—time is abstract and flavors swell. Some places write themselves into you. Not with the brazen, drunken scrawl of a big city, but like a myth-spun sweetness stitched into the lining of your memory. Casa Angelina—hovering high above the sea in Praiano—does exactly that. This is where modern minimalism meets Mediterranean magic. As you step inside, bleached-white walls and glass sculptures by Alfredo Sosabravo evoke the surreal: It’s as if Dalí summoned a seaside retreat.
Arrive breathless—possibly from the stairs (there are many)—but more likely from the sense you’ve stumbled not merely into a hotel, rather into a kind of living stillness. A white page waiting for poetry. Mornings unfold with a caffè freddo sipped in the hush of the terrace, the Tyrrhenian below glinting like wet silk. Even the furniture seems to exhale—a Sorrentine armchair angled just so, light pooling on the tiled floor like spilled limoncello.
Un Piano Nel Ciclo—literally, “a floor in the sky”—boasts one of Amalfi’s most esteemed dinner reservations, and Michelin agrees. Crowned with a coveted star, the restaurant flirts with the divine without losing its roots. Under Chef Leopoldo Elefante’s dreamy choreography, each dish—delicate cru of langoustine, and pastas that seem to inhale the salt air—lands like an edible sunburst: radiant, precise, and entirely seductive.
Casa Angelina’s private glass elevator descends to La Gavitella beach, likely the most sun-drenched west-facing stretch on the coast. For those who think beaches are just the appetizer, the hotel’s private boat, Lady Angelina, glides guests past hidden coves, into Capri’s wave-worn grottoes, and along Sorrento’s storied shoreline.
Over at Borgo Santandrea, rooms slope down the cliffside like a well-bred secret—part hotel, part Antonioni set piece. Feigning nonchalance while clearly very pleased with itself, the resort boasts the only private sandy beach in the region (a detail so discreet you nearly miss the flex). Staff have the air of people who could tie a cravat while blindfolded. There’s a boat named something sleek and vowel-heavy, which you may take out to “discover” Amalfi, as if the coast were an affair you’re just now admitting to. At Alici, their Michelin-starred restaurant, dinner arrives looking posed for a still life and tastes like the orchard’s favorite child. It’s all so elegant it edges on surreal: vintage tiles one imagines only monks or mildly deranged collectors would lay by hand, and a pool so blue it feels suspicious. You don’t stay at Borgo. You temporarily become someone more fascinating who does.
For those who prefer their dolce vita minus the crowds and rich in intrigue, enter Access Italy’s Pearls of the Mediterranean—a nine-day fever dream stitched together by insiders who know which artisan makes sandals for popes and which trattoria will ruin you for all others. Capri’s cinematic magnetism by private boat and twilight cruise; Amalfi is all cliff-dives and cooking classes in sun-drenched estates. Pompeii comes with a guide who skips the toga talk and lava platitudes, unpacking the ruins like a cold case. By Naples, you’re deep into raw alleys of pizza and pastel architecture, street-food sermons and subtext.
In the end, what lingers isn’t just the salt on your skin or the aftertaste of some absurdly flawless spaghetti alle vongole—it’s the sense that Capri clocked your secrets before you’d unpacked, and Amalfi forgave them before dessert. Served with the wink of an ancient god and the timing of a Vespa downshift.
This article originally appeared in Maxim’sSeptember/October 2025 issue.
