Capri Palace

Capri Palace

Built in August 1960 by Mario Cacace on the upper reaches of Anacapri, the highest and quietest of the island's two towns, the hotel that opened as Hotel Europa Palace began as a four-star family operation and became, across the following three decades, a collection of obsessions: art, medicine, food, and the particular light that falls on Capri's northwest corner. Mario Cacace and his wife Rita, who in 1953 had opened a small boutique in Anacapri called MarioRita, fusing their names and their ambitions, translated that same sensibility into the hotel as it grew and transformed, and it was their son Tonino who, as second-generation owner, built it into one of the most specific hotels in southern Italy before Jumeirah acquired the property. Gianfranco Frattini, the Italian designer and architect, shaped the hotel's bones in the 1960s, those Doric columns and arched ceilings that still anchor the common areas, and the result sits at around 300 metres above sea level with views over the Gulf of Naples and the island of Ischia, reached by a ferry from Naples and a driver waiting at the port. Across 67 rooms and suites, it has operated as the Jumeirah Capri Palace since the Dubai group's acquisition, with five new suites added in 2025 designed by Patricia Urquiola Studio and named Mariorita, a deliberate loop back to the founding boutique and the couple who started it all. The interiors work in white, cream, and the muted blues of the Campanian coast, with handcrafted Vietri terracotta tiles, terrazzo floors, and antique mirrors distributed across a property that also functions as the White Museum, a sprawling collection of contemporary art threaded through every corridor and courtyard. At the entrance, Arnaldo Pomodoro's forty-metre fiberglass installation Rive dei Mari runs the length of the wall, recalling a seabed, and Mimmo Paladino's helmet marks the threshold with something stoic and mythological. Paintings by Giorgio De Chirico and Schifano hang alongside pool floors painted by Giorgio Tonelli in the suites with private pools. The food programme runs to four restaurants: L'Olivo, the hotel's dining room, has held two Michelin stars since 2011 under executive chef Andrea Migliaccio, Ischia-born, whose tasting menu draws from Campanian tradition with a lightness that reads as confidence rather than restraint, and whose cellar occupies a subterranean space renovated by architect Francesco della Femina. Il Riccio, the cliffside beach club beside the Blue Grotto, holds one Michelin star and serves seafood with a view that makes it hard to concentrate on eating. Zuma Capri occupies the rooftop. The Capri Medical Spa, which runs the Leg School, a vascular treatment programme created by Professor Francesco Canonaco, draws a returning clientele who book the hotel specifically around it, and who are not in the minority. The experience here is fundamentally that of a hotel with a point of view, which is rarer than it should be: Tonino Cacace spent decades acquiring works, building a cooking culture, and developing a spa with clinical rather than purely cosmetic ambitions, and the result is a property that accumulates into something with genuine coherence rather than dispersing its energy into amenities. Anacapri itself is the quieter, more residential upper town, and arriving here rather than in the chaos of Capri town below is, in high season, the most significant comfort the hotel offers. That said, this is not a place of understatement: the art is present and intentional, the dining is formal and priced accordingly, and the Mariorita suites, with their soft whites and Urquiola-shaped arches, are the kind of rooms that will inevitably be photographed, which the hotel seems to accept with equanimity. The guests who feel most at home here tend to have a strong position on Andrea Migliaccio's food, an appointment at the Leg School, and a preference for Anacapri's relative stillness over the spectacle of the piazzetta below. You should not come if you want discretion for its own sake, if you are quietly allergic to art hotels that know they are art hotels, or if the combination of a Jumeirah brand and the ghost of Gwyneth Paltrow (the presidential suite is named for her) lands wrong. The Il Ragù terrace can feel like a different hotel to L'Olivo's cellar. You should come if you have wanted to eat Migliaccio's cooking for some time, if the Leg School has been recommended to you by someone who knows, or if you want to be on Capri in July without staying in Capri in July. The short version: A 67-room hotel in Anacapri, opened as Hotel Europa Palace in 1960 by Mario and Rita Cacace and now owned by Jumeirah, with two Michelin stars at L'Olivo, a serious medical spa, and a contemporary art collection distributed across every surface.