As tourists arrive, Italians are crowded on the holiday island of Capri – Life & Style

CAPRI, Italy: Famous for its blue sea, breathtaking views and cove-studded coastline, the Mediterranean island of Capri has been a tourist resort since the early years of the Roman Empire.

Unlike in its imperial heyday, when emperors made it their exclusive playground, Capri now attracts visitors from all over the world, clogging its narrow alleys, filling its squares and blocking its beaches during the hot summer months.

In high season, as many as 16,000 tourists a day flock to the rocky island, more than its 12,900 inhabitants. Most are day trippers, but more and more people are staying overnight as more and more homes are rented out to vacation rentals, which brings its own problems.

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“Capri is becoming a dormitory for tourists,” said Teodorico Boniello, head of the local consumer association. “More people are coming than we can handle and families can’t settle because they can’t afford to stay.”

Capri is a microcosm of many European holiday hotspots. Locals depend on visitors for their livelihood, but the rise of mass tourism threatens to turn their picture-perfect beauty spots into blobs of shuffling humanity.

Some Italian cities and islands are starting to retreat, albeit cautiously. Venice last week became the first city in the world to introduce an entrance fee for visitors in peak periods, Florence has banned new holiday lets in the city center and the Cinque Terre Park on the Italian Riviera has started charging 15 euros for entry a popular coastal town. sidewalk to combat overcrowding.

Capri has doubled its own visitor fee from 2.5 euros to 5 euros, which outsiders pay when taking the ferry from nearby Naples or Sorrento from April to October.

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“We want to convince more people to visit during the winter,” said Capri Mayor Marino Lembo Reuterssitting in his office with the smog of Naples far in the distance.

But it seems unlikely that such a fee will deter tourists from traveling to an island that has more than four million tagged photos on Instagram, attracting an endless stream of visitors eager to add similar views to their social media pages.

Moreover, local residents say it will do nothing to help alleviate the housing crisis, which is forcing many essential workers, including teachers and doctors, to live on the mainland.

Starts early

Antonio De Chiara, 22, wakes up at 5.20am every morning in his hometown near Naples to ensure he can catch the 7am ferry, which takes 50 minutes to reach Capri. About 400 other commuters join him on the ride across the bay.

Barely outside Naples, those on a tight schedule begin lining up to ensure they are the first off the boat to get a seat on one of the few small buses that travel up the hill into the city. Those left behind risk a long wait.

“It would be wonderful to live in Capri, but it is very difficult. Even if I could find a place, the rent would take up all my salary,” says De Chiara, who recently got a job as a child therapist on the island.

Stefano Busiello, 54, teaches math at a high school in Capri, but lives in Naples and has been traveling back and forth for 20 years. “I’ve never tried to find a house here. I could never afford one and things are getting harder and harder.”

Only 20% of the staff at his school actually live in Capri, he said, with everyone else arriving by ferries – a daily grind that means most of his colleagues don’t stay for more than two or three years before transferring schools search on the mainland.

Roberto Faravelli, who runs a Bed and Breakfast near the port, says people like him might be willing to rent their properties to workers if the region offered incentives to fill the gap in lucrative vacation rentals.

“The government should encourage homeowners to offer long-term rental rates. What we are missing is someone who is trying to solve these problems,” he said.

But Mayor Lembo did not expect the authorities to intervene. “It’s unfortunate, but this is the market economy at work.”

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Post-Covid wave

Holiday rental platform Airbnb offers more than 500 properties on Capri, up from around 110 in 2016. This is just the tip of the iceberg: local families rent out their properties during the summer months on unregulated portals.

“This short-term rental market is chaotic. There are no controls,” said Lembo. Despite apparent outrage over the lack of viable housing, Capri has not yet witnessed the kind of protests seen elsewhere – such as in Spain’s Canary Islands, where thousands took to the streets this month to demand limits on the number of tourists.

The end of the COVID pandemic has seen a surge in tourism across Europe, as travelers around the world try to make up for lost time.

Italy had a near-record number of overnight stays in 2023, according to data collected by the Florence Center of Tourism Studies, and was the fifth most visited country in the world in 2023, with tourists drawn to its quaint villages and culture-rich cities.

But none are built for mass travel.

In high season, a fleet of ferries takes up to 5,000 visitors to Capri’s small port in just two hours in the morning. Everyone wants to go to the town of Capri and smaller Anacapri, but the buses can only carry 30 people at a time and the funicular 50.

“In the summer you can easily wait two or even three hours to get up the hill. The quays are filling up. No one can move,” Boniello said as he scrolled through videos of people standing against each other on his phone.

Lembo acknowledges the problems, but denies that tourism is ruining an island where his ancestors have lived for centuries. “I don’t agree with nostalgics who say that Capri was more beautiful a hundred years ago. There was misery and poverty then. Now there is prosperity, and that is thanks to tourism.”