Capri historical timeline

Capri was settled long before Rome, and the Greeks held it before the Romans did. Augustus acquired it for himself in 29 BC, reportedly trading Ischia for it, and made it an imperial possession. Tiberius moved here in AD 27 and governed the empire from the island until his death a decade later, building a set of villas of which Villa Jovis on the eastern headland is the largest surviving.

After the empire the island became peripheral and stayed that way for centuries, raided from the sea and poor enough that Anacapri and Capri functioned as separate worlds joined only by a rock staircase. A Carthusian monastery was founded in 1371 and is still standing.

British and French forces took turns occupying Capri during the Napoleonic wars. The modern island begins in the later nineteenth century, when foreign residents arrived: the Swedish physician Axel Munthe built Villa San Michele on the site of a Roman villa and later wrote a memoir about it that sold enormously. Maxim Gorky spent years here in exile from Russia, and Lenin visited him twice.

The 1950s turned Capri into shorthand for a certain kind of glamour, and gave the world a style of trouser named after it. That decade still shapes how the island is marketed and, to a degree, what it sells.