How Was Capri Built

The local building tradition is distinctive and practical: thick whitewashed walls, small windows, and roofs made of shallow barrel vaults rather than timber. Vaults were used because the island had stone and lime but almost no large timber, and the curved roofs also collect rainwater, which on a karst island with no springs was not a minor consideration.

Underneath a good deal of it is Roman. Tiberius is credited with twelve villas here, and Villa Jovis survives as a substantial terraced complex on the eastern cliff, with its own cisterns cut into the rock. Villa San Michele in Anacapri was deliberately built on Roman remains and incorporates fragments throughout.

For most of the island’s history the only link between its two towns was the Scala Fenicia, a staircase of some nine hundred steps cut into the cliff face — Greek in origin despite the Phoenician name. The carriage road to Anacapri was not completed until the 1870s, and the funicular from the harbour opened in 1907.

Via Krupp, the switchback path zigzagging down the southern cliff, was cut in 1902 at the expense of the German industrialist whose name it carries. The chairlift to Monte Solaro followed in the 1950s.