Villa Marina Capri Hotel & Spa

Villa Marina Capri Hotel & Spa

On Via Provinciale Marina Grande, the old road that climbs from Capri's port to the Piazzetta, a private villa dating to 1915 has been restored and opened as a hotel by architect Massimo Esposito, one of the island's most prolific restorers of prestigious villas, a man whose other projects include the Grand Hotel Tiberio Palace and the Gatto Bianco. The result is 22 rooms and suites spread across a property that rises above Marina Grande on a bluff with unbroken views across the Gulf of Naples toward Mount Vesuvius, the Sorrentine Peninsula, and the island of Ischia. The entrance, it must be said, is discouraging: the pull-in off the narrow road reads more like a car park than an arrival, the hotel shuttle collecting guests from the port below and depositing them here before the property opens up, through a calm reception, into what is one of the lovelier gardens on the island, a secular park of palms, rose beds, hammocks, and Mediterranean planting that the busier hotels higher up the hill cannot match. The hotel is a Neapolitan family operation, with the restaurant named Ziqù after a nickname belonging to one of the owners. Each of the 22 rooms and suites is individually designed and named for a figure who shaped Capri's cultural life in the early twentieth century: suites bearing the names of Edwin Cerio, Filippo Marinetti, and Charles C. Coleman open onto large sea-view terraces with private plunge pools; other rooms reference Curzio Malaparte, Pablo Neruda, Axel Munthe, Norman Douglas, and Fortunato Depero, furnished with original artworks and memorabilia, Italian designer pieces, and oversized bathrooms with tub or rain shower. Chef Manuele Cattaruzza, a Venetian with stints at Le Cirque in New York, the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park, and Le Gavroche in London before arriving at Villa Marina in 2014, runs Ziqù, a restaurant of around sixty indoor covers and twenty more under the garden's lemon trees, open to non-residents and dedicated to Campanian cooking with a contemporary edge: local mozzarella, fresh seafood, the sort of plating that the hotel's Instagram account makes considerable use of. Il Roseto, a more intimate dining space set within the rose garden, takes reservations for private dinners. The Stai Spa offers a Turkish bath, sauna, chromotherapy, hydromassage jets, and a heated pool, with a signature treatment, the Rituel Nourrisant Après-Soleil, developed by the French eco-luxury line Cinq Mondes exclusively for the property. Breakfast is served on La Pergola Terrace. What Villa Marina gets right is proportion. It is small enough that the garden feels genuinely private, and positioned low enough on the hill, close to the port and to the island's largest beach, that you can actually reach the water without a shuttle or a funicular, which is not something the hilltop properties can say. The rooms named for suites with private pools, particularly the Castello, which faces south-east, are among the better rooms on the island for the combination of space, view, and seclusion. The garden, with its hammocks and outdoor bar beneath a perfumed pergola, is where a certain kind of guest will spend most of their time and not feel they have missed anything. The cultural conceit, each room a portrait of a historical figure, is executed with enough restraint that it reads as scholarship rather than theming. You should not come if you want the social theatre of the Piazzetta on your doorstep, the scene of the Hotel Quisisana, or the kind of arrival that announces itself. The entrance alone will test your patience, and the road outside can be noisy with traffic. You should come if what you want from Capri is the island's actual history rather than its current reputation, a garden to disappear into, a serious kitchen open to the public, and a room named after a writer you already admire. The short version: A restored 1915 villa above Marina Grande with 22 rooms named for Capri's early-twentieth-century cultural figures, a garden that does the island justice, and a restaurant, Ziqù, with a chef who has worked at Le Gavroche.