Capri

The island and hilltop town in the Bay of Naples, Italy. The town’s central square is the Piazza Umberto I, known as the Piazzetta.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Neither Here Nor There	Bill Bryson	setting	A hard climb to a lovely square, where after dark Bryson falls “permanently in love with Italy”.
Dept. Of Speculation.md	Jenny Offill	setting	An early-April trip with no other tourists: “Would it fix my brain?”

Neither Here Nor There — Bill Bryson (1991)

Source: Readwise highlight

I passed beneath an arch and stepped out into one of the loveliest squares I have ever seen. It was packed with German and Japanese tourists. The tears streamed down my cheeks.

• Role: setting, then turning point
• In the book: Chapter 14. Bryson takes the ferry over from Sorrento, finds the funicolare not running, and climbs from the quay past villas and up steep cobbled alleys until he comes out into the square. He takes a room at the Hotel Capri and describes “an infinitely charming little place of villas and tiny lemon groves”. Its heart is the Piazza Umberto I, with cream-coloured buildings, café tables, a white church up wide steps at one end and a railed terrace at the other. At dusk he follows a path uphill past grand villas to a public lookout “hanging out over a precipice of rock—a little patio in the sky”. After dinner he returns to the square, now empty of tour groups: locals gather after supper, teenagers lounge on the church steps, and the lights of Naples shine across the water.
• Why it matters: The square is where Bryson stands “for perhaps an hour and a half” and realises he has “fallen spectacularly, hopelessly, and permanently in love with Italy”, the declared turning point of his Italian chapters. The next morning brings rain, and a slow ferry to Naples.

Dept. of Speculation — Jenny Offill (2014)

Source: Dept. Of Speculation.md · Readwise highlight

We did not understand where we were going when we took the boat over to Capri.

• Role: setting
• In the book: An early section, before the marriage turns. In early April, in a light cold rain, the couple take the boat over and a funicular up from the dock and find themselves the only tourists (“You are early”). The streets smell of lavender; from a cheap hotel the water is “wickedly blue” under a dark cliff. Waiting at a bus stop, the narrator wonders “what it would be like to live somewhere so beautiful. Would it fix my brain?” On the far side of the island he buys her gum labelled BROOKLYN.
• Why it matters: The book’s one dwelt-on trip, and the first statement of the hope that a place could cure her, which the later move from Brooklyn to the country tests. Read beside Bryson: two visitors who both fall for the island out of season.