Eat Drink Sleep Swim: Capri, Italy Edition
It's all boats, beach clubs, limoncello, and boys.
If you’ve never been before, this is your sign to visit Capri with your mom, best friend(s), sister, sister-in-law, aunt, whoever you want to eat pomodoro and drink limoncello with this year. Tack it onto a longer Italy trip of course (last year was my first time in the country, can you believe?) to take full advantage of all the food, drinks, sights, museums, and more this Bel Paese has to offer.
The hotel my bestie and I stayed at (for our somewhat made-up bachelorette party for two) is mentioned in a previous post here:
I Stayed at Over 40 Hotels This Year
That’s 3+ unique hotel stays per month. I practically lived in hotels in 2023. Hotels and Minnesota, actually—I did the math and spent 40 days(!!!) in my brother’s and sister in law’s Saint Paul home broken down into multiple visits from the end of January to early December. Good thing I like where they live. What a whirlwind.
And below, there’s a little more… mostly pics because this has been sitting in my drafts for literally months and I’m trying again to push more than one letter out every couple weeks.
Eat and Drink at…
Gennaro’s at Hotel La Palma for dinner and people watching (they make their own pomodoro and it’s delicious — they even gave us a jar to take home). Finish off with limoncello, which seems to be the norm everywhere you go on this island. For lunch, try Da Gioia at the beach club at Marina Piccola Beach. The servers are cute and they are very nice.
Go to Zuma for drinks and to see the sunset (it’s incredible), but make sure to have a reservation because they are really snooty about letting people in, even if it’s half empty. Your travel agent or hotel can make a resy for you.
That lemon tree restaurant you’ve probably been seeing all over IG is called da Paolino. I got the lemon pasta, of course, and we finished off the meal with what else but shots of limoncello, which were offered with the check.
Have as much gelato as possible and, this might sound weird but, on the ferry from Naples to Capri, have a frozen coffee from the machine. Just trust me.
Sleep at…
You need to be an actual millionaire to stay at some of these places, but if money isn’t an issue, consider Capri Palace Jumeirah, JK Place Capri, or Hotel La Palma (which was Capri’s first ever hotel, and where we stayed. I feel so lucky. (I can book them for you, too!) Staying on the island is cool because when the day-trippers leave you have the charming cobblestone streets all to yourselves. Daytime can be a little overwhelming in high season with the extreme heat and the amount of tourists walking around.
Swim at…
The beach clubs (Marina Piccola — the bay where, they say, Ulysses was seduced by the sirens), your hotel pool if you’ve got one, and in the Tyrrhenian Sea. I hate to admit it because I get so seasick, but renting a boat for the day (with a captain — we had a father/son duo, which was so sweet) is really the way to go, although they may cancel on you more than once if the waters are too rocky. What I’m saying is: have a plan B. It was really, truly incredible to see Positano and Amalfi and everything else by boat. We had our little drinks and listened to music and swam, which was actually both scary and exhilarating, especially when it seemed like the boat was drifting further and further away from us. We forget how tiny we are in this great big world, but the ocean never fails to remind us.
Looking for more Italy inspo? > > >
Eat Drink Sleep Explore: Florence on a Time Crunch
I love how all these publications and digital newsletters are doing their own version of eat-drink-sleep-stay-play-read-listen or whatever. The latest is Daily Skimm with its read.eat.go series, which debuted today and will go out via email every Saturday. It—you guessed it—will feature a book, a recipe, and a vacation destination. Like, hello? I’ve been doing this forever, but carry on. In reading through it, though, I realized theSkimm’s is a way more simplified version that I could learn from. Am I doing too much?
5 Things I Loved About Rome
Writing a destination guide to Rome for IHG this week and figured I could not put off my own Rome newsletter much longer. I was there in September of last year (6 months already??? it’s scary how time flies) and it was a quick, whirlwind stay after Florence
First time reading "have a frozen coffee from the machine" as a recommendation in print but I'll take your word for it. Any idea what kind of coffee it was?