ITALY: Isle of Dreams

For all the beauty of its vivid-hued cliffs and luminous Blue Grotto, Italy's fabled Bay of Naples island of Capri owes its reputation less to its scenery than to two of its former inhabitants. One was the Emperor Tiberius, who retired some 1,900 years ago to a mountaintop villa from which, records Suetonius, "condemned persons, after long and exquisite tortures, used to be hurled, on his orders and in his presence, into the sea." The other was British Author Norman Douglas, whose bestselling South Wind (1917) painted a thinly disguised picture of Capri as a haunt of elegant wickedness....

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