Capri
Capri (Italian pronunciation Cápri, usual English pronunciation Caprí) is an Italian island off the Sorrentine Peninsula. On the south side of the Gulf of Naples, it has been a celebrated beauty spot and resort since the time of the Roman Republic. The features are a litany of postcard views: the Marina Piccola (Small Harbor), the Belvedere of Tragara, which is a high panoramic promenade lined with villas, the limestone masses that stand out of the sea (the 'Faraglioni'), Anacapri, the Blue Grotto ('Grotta Azzurra'). Above all are the ruins of the Imperial Roman villas. Capri is in the region of Campania, Province of Naples. The City of Capri is the main center of population on Capri. It has two adjoining harbours, Marina Piccola and Marina Grande (the main port of the island).
 In January 1806, French troops occupied the island. The British ousted the French troops in May of the same year. Capri was turned into a powerful naval base (a "Second Gibraltar"), but the building program caused heavy damage to the archaeological sites. Joachim Murat conquered back Capri in 1808, and the French remained there until the end of the Napoleonic era (1815), when Capri was returned to the Bourbon ruling house of Naples.
In the 2nd half of the 19th century, Capri became a popular resort for European artists, writers and other celebrities. John Singer Sargent and Frank Hyde are among the prominent artist who stayed on the island around the late 1870s. Sargent is best known for his series of portraits featuring the most beautiful Capri model, Rosina Ferrara. An own villa or a stay of more than three months is reported for: Norman Douglas, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, Christian Wilhelm Allers, Emil von Behring, Curzio Malaparte, Axel Munthe, Maxim Gorky. Gracie Fields also had a villa on the Island and sang two songs, "The Isle of Capri" and "Come Back to Sorrento" about Capri. When she died on the island in 1978, she left her villa to female impersonator, Danny La Rue who reportedly spends most of the year in Capri when he isn't in a production.
Capri in Literature
 The book that spawned the 19th century fascination with Capri in France, Germany, and England was Entdeckung der Blauen Grotte auf der Insel Capri by the German painter and writer August Kopisch, in which he describes his 1826 stay on Capri and his (re)discovery of the Blue Grotto.
Capri is also the setting for "The Lotus Eater", a short-story by Somerset Maugham. In the story, the protagonist from Boston comes to Capri on a holiday and is so enchanted by the place he gives up his job and decides to spend the rest of his life in leisure at Capri.
Claude Debussy refers to the island's hills in the title of his impressionistic prélude Les collines d'Anacapri (1910).
Jacques d'Adelsward-Fersen wrote the roman à clef Et le feu s’èteignit sur le mer (1910) about Capri and its residents in the early 20th century, causing a minor scandal. Fersen's life on Capri the subject of Roger Peyrefitte's fictionalised biography, L'Exile de Capri. Norman Douglas's novel South Wind is set in Capri and many of its residents and visitors are only thinly disguised. Douglas also wrote a number of other books and pamphlets on Capri incuding Capri (1930) and his last work, A Footnote on Capri (1952). Douglas, Fersen, the 19th century poet August Graf von Platen, and other writers were attracted to Capri by the opportunity to carry out their homosexual life-styles. A satirical presentation of the island's lesbian colony in the 1920s is made by Compton Mackenzie's novel Extraordinary Women (1928).
Edwin Cerio's book Aria di Capri (1928) (later translated as That Capri Air) contains a number of historical and biographical essays on the island, including a tribute to Norman Douglas.
The writer and Swedish royal physician Axel Munthe (1857–1949) built the Villa San Michele near Anacapri. His memoirs, The Story of San Michele were published in 1929.
Shirley Hazzard wrote the memoir Graham on Capri: A Memoir (2000) about her reminiscences of Graham Greene and Capri. Greene was also a friend of Norman Douglas in the latter's last years, and edited (and perhaps extensively rewrote) the memoirs of Elisabeth Moor, who worked as a doctor on Capri from 1926 until the 1970s (An Impossible Woman:The Memoirs of Dottoressa Moor (1975)).
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