Villa Lysis and its empty colonnade

Villa Lysis was built in 1905 by a French poet who left Paris for Capri, and it has the melancholy of a house that was lived in briefly and then left. Four Ionic columns and a gilded inscription front a portico; inside, mosaic floors, a marble staircase and rooms stripped back to bare plaster open onto terraces above the sea.

For photographers it is the opposite of the rest of Capri: architecture instead of panorama, shade instead of glare, and almost nobody in it. The portico gives clean columns and directional light in the morning; the staircase and the empty rooms give soft, even interiors that work at any hour; the garden terrace at the back looks across to the Sorrentine coast. Weathered plaster in ochre and rose does most of the colour work by itself.

Getting there is a twenty-five minute uphill walk from the Piazzetta along Via Tiberio — steady, paved and unshaded, so not a walk for formal shoes in July. The villa is ticketed with seasonal hours and closes on some weekdays and in winter; check before building a session around it. Villa Jovis, Tiberius's palace on the headland above, is another ten minutes further and pairs naturally with it.