Villa San Michele (Axel Munthe)
Anacapri
FamousMuseums
The story
The white house that Swedish doctor Axel Munthe built among ancient columns and pergolas, with its granite sphinx gazing out over the Gulf of Naples.
Access
€ 12, closed in February
More gems in Anacapri
In the water & divingGrotta Azzurra
Anacapri
You enter lying flat in a small rowing boat through a low cleft, and inside the water lights up in a luminous blue that seems to rise from the depths.
Nature & hikingMonte Solaro (seggiovia)
Anacapri
The chairlift climbs in silence over vineyards and gardens to the island's highest peak, where the eye takes in the whole gulf.
Sacred artEremo di Cetrella
Anacapri
A small Marian hermitage tucked among the rocks below Monte Solaro, reached on foot through the scent of the scrub and the silence of the heights.
History & archaeologyCasa Rossa
Anacapri
The Pompeian-red residence an American colonel wanted in Moorish style, today the keeper of the Roman statues recovered from the waters of the Grotta Azzurra.
Sacred artChiesa di San Michele (pavimento maiolicato)
Anacapri
A majolica floor tells of Adam and Eve driven out of the Garden of Eden, to be admired from above to take in the full sweep of its eighteenth-century colours.
- History & archaeology
Villa Damecuta
Anacapri
The remains of an imperial Roman villa on a sheer promontory, among olive trees and a medieval tower, with the gaze stretching toward Ischia.
More gems: Museums
- Museums
Ospedale delle Bambole
Napoli
Behind a shop window in Palazzo Marigliano a craftsman mends glass eyes, porcelain arms and dolls' curls, in a workshop born more than a century ago.
- Museums
Museo MEdA
(AV)
Room after room it rebuilds the peasant world of the Alta Irpinia: trades, objects and rites of a vanished civilisation, where daily life was interwoven with magic and superstition.
- Museums
Il Torrione (Museo Civico Giovanni Maltese)
Forio (NA)
Built in 1480 to spot Saracen sails, this cylinder of tufo (volcanic tuff) became four centuries later the home-studio of the sculptor Giovanni Maltese, who lived here into the twentieth century. Today his sculptures still inhabit the tower that once had to defend Forio from pirates.
- Museums
Villa La Colombaia (Museo Luchino Visconti)
Forio (NA)
Here Luchino Visconti wrote, quarrelled and hid from the world, among the holm oaks of Zaro and a view that slips straight into his films. The director wanted to be buried here: the park is still his, more than the villa.
- Museums
Museo del Mare (Palazzo dell'Orologio)
Ischia (NA)
Three floors of nets, ex voto, models and photographs of men who set out to sea and never returned. It is the museum the fishermen of Ischia Ponte built for themselves, in the clock tower palace that marked the rhythm of their departures.
- Museums
MUDIS — Museo Diocesano di Ischia
Ischia (NA)
Silverware, vestments and painted panels gathered from the island's churches after earthquakes and collapses. It is the storehouse of Ischia's sacred memory, and almost no tourist ever opens its doors.