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. Douglas himself was asked to leave Capri by the police when he tried to translate some of his fancies into reality; nonetheless, he established the island in the world's mind as the nirvana of the rich and jaded.

Last week, swarming to Capri in the thousands, tourists from Stockholm and Skowhegan discovered that Douglas' isle of dreams is rapidly being converted into a larger Coney Island with peculiar Mediterranean overtones. Last year Capri's 9,000 inhabitants watched 1,250,690 visitors scurry about the island; this year even more tourists are expected. Recoiling at the mere memory of Capri's milling mob of middle-class humanity, one starchy American matron indignantly proclaimed: "And for this I gave up a papal audience."

The Crowd Watchers. Today's typical Capri visitor is not the Roman princeling or wealthy foreign eccentric of old; far more often, he is the earnest German tourist who has come over just for the day on the ferry from Naples (fare: 70¢) wearing only shorts and sandals, carrying only a camera and a lunch box. And to meet the taste of the new invaders, the Capresi have converted the once-charming fishing village of Marina Grande into a boardwalk displaying cheap religious bibelots and tinny music boxes that wheeze out the saccharine strains of The Isle of Cap-ree.

From Marina Grande most visitors take a shiny new aluminum funicular (fare: 28¢) up to the tiny Piazza Umberto, Capri's main square. There the day excursionist mounts the steps behind the piazza--to save money, he does not take a cafe table--and watches the crowd swirling beneath: men with pink shoes and dyed blond hair, women in sequined toreador slacks or skintight shorts.

4 to 1. The new middle-class Capri does its best to live up to the reputation of the island that takes its name from the goats that used to sport on its hillside. Women visitors to Capri outnumber men 4 to 1. ("That figure," noted an Italian paper tartly last week, "does not include members of the third sex.") Drawn by the abundance of femininity, Italian males drift from one pretty visitor to another, always careful to move on before it comes time to pay the bill. "These men flap around like butterflies," lamented a French girl. "In France we are delicate and have romance."

Touches of Capri's onetime elegance remain. Villas offering a view of Capri's cliffs and of the blue-green sea still command prices as high as $160,000. Celebrities still flock to Canzone del Mare (Song of the Sea), the pleasant seaside pavilion operated by British Comedienne Gracie Fields. But inexorably the box-lunch crowd is evicting the international set. Last week, when Greek Shipping Magnate Aristotle Onassis moored his yacht off Capri, such Onassis guests as the Winston Churchills and Opera Star Maria Callas did not even bother to go ashore. Sighs Gracie Fields: "Alcatraz was a beautiful island, too."

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