A glamorous new start for Capri’s oldest hotel

The Hotel La Palma — founded in 1822, billed as the oldest hostelry on Capri — sits at the junction of Via Vittorio Emanuele and Via Sella Orta in Capri town. In the first days of June, this corner was already heaving. As was much of the rest of the island: a porter collected me from the harbour at Marina Grande, but we had to abandon our car at the Piazzetta Federico Strina, several hundred yards short of the normal disembarkation point. A huge American wedding party was pouring down the road; event planners wearing badges with the bride and groom’s initials on them were vigorously sidelining traffic to make way for the couple.

Kind of an ignominious arrival to such an exclusive hotel, I found myself thinking as we trudged up the road, through the town’s famous — and rammed — Piazzetta, and down the Vittorio Emanuele, where we navigated a gaggle of twentysomethings engrossed in a round of selfies at the hotel’s entrance before we finally passed through its doors.

But also to be expected. In the past 15 or so years, the myth and allure of the Capri lifestyle, large in the imaginations of millions since the 1950s, has exploded across social media to an audience of billions. More recent, and acute, an issue is post-pandemic “revenge” travel. Far from having exhausted itself last summer, it seems to have intensified here in Italy, where early May in Rome already had the oversubscribed contours of a normal July.

All of which means that, these days, delivering the Capri dream of old — romantic, elegant, exclusive — requires a calibre of hospitality that’s not for the faint of heart. The stakes are even higher with coordinates, and a legacy, as illustrious as this hotel has. La Palma is now under the management of the Oetker Collection, which reopened it on June 2 after an extensive two-year renovation and expansion.

The German company’s portfolio includes Le Bristol in Paris and the Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc in Antibes, two properties that have cultivated serious flex in the glamour stakes since at least the middle of the last century. The latter in particular is a proper destination, its genius loci built on long associations with aristocracy, artists and the Cannes Film Festival. Oetker’s hope on Capri — unofficial, but articulated a few times before and during my stay — seems to be to, eventually, make La Palma the Hotel du Cap’s analogue in Italy: no mere hotel, but the acme of la dolce vita caprese.

It’s an idea that goes back a long way, on a tiny island just under 10.5 sq km big. Grottos and cliffs, natural arches and the famous Faraglioni rock formations off Punta di Tragara, inlets lapped by waters whose tones defy the blue-green spectrum of the Pantone chart to contain them — they’ve been part of the islands sell since Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, fell for it. He and his stepson Tiberius were the most illustrious early tourists. Tiberius eventually self-exiled here for 12 years, and died on the island. An early-morning walk up to the ruins of Villa Jovis, his pleasure palace on Capri’s far eastern tip, is one of the best (and last) ways to have the island a bit to yourself.

The original 80 rooms have been reduced to 50 to create more suites, including the 227 sq m La Palma suite, which Oetker says is the biggest on the island. A pool has been added on the first floor terrace — it’s not large, but the allocation of more space to slick cabanas, loungers and a bar, called Aqua, makes sense (no one comes to Capri to do lengths). Gennaro Esposito, the affable Neapolitan television personality chef, oversees the two restaurants (his Torre del Saracino, just across the water on the Sorrentine coast, holds two Michelin stars).

Gennaro’s, on the ground floor, is the main destination venue, while Bianca, the multi-station rooftop restaurant, with 360-degree views over Capri town and Monte Solaro, was much touted by the hotel’s managers as the eventual pièce de résistance — a proposition that remains theoretical, because it wasn’t yet up and running, nor was I even permitted a quick look (no opening date was confirmed, likewise for the small spa, with its three treatment rooms and steam-sauna circuit). Esposito also oversees the kitchens at Da Gioia, the hotel’s beach club, a 15-minute walk away in Marina Piccola.

Though Oetker manage the hotel, it is owned by the London-based Reuben Brothers group, who acquired it in late 2019 (the group’s property holdings also include Venice’s Baglioni Hotel Luna and Palazzo Experimental, and the former Central Bank of Italy building in Rome that will become a Corinthia hotel in 2025). The Reubens approached Oetker in 2020, and renovations kicked off in earnest in 2021, notwithstanding the predictable supply-chain and staffing issues. But these continued to plague progress well into last year — the opening, originally scheduled for April 2022, was delayed to June, then August, then September, and finally shelved until 2023, but not before some stressful eleventh-hour shuffling of bookings into other properties across the island.

“It was for sure one of the more challenging openings I or anyone on my team [had worked on],” says Oetker chief executive Timo Gruenert. “It’s better to admit it, really.” The wait has only amplified expectations, both within the travel industry and among the jet-set punters who follow such news. (When I tell Gruenert about the “Hotel du Cap of Italy” aspirations I’ve heard voiced here and there, he laughs. “I personally hadn’t really thought in those terms but, yeah, now that you say it, where do I sign up?”)

The hotel’s celebrated, if somewhat colloquial, history was rich fodder for its reimagination. The Locanda Pagano, as it was known in 1822, operated as an ad hoc guesthouse. Its owner, Giuseppe Pagano, would invite Grand Tour-ing artists, writers, musicians and poets to stay in exchange for cultivated company and, occasionally, works of art (including murals). Pagano’s son Michele continued the barter model for a couple of decades before turning it officially into a hotel. It remained in the family’s hands until 1922, when it was renamed La Palma, and changed hands again twice before the Reubens and Oetker took control.

The Maltese interior designer Francis Sultana was brought on at the suggestion of Debra Reuben, the wife of RB Group co-chair David Reuben, with whom Sultana worked on private residential projects. It is Sultana’s first hotel experience, but far from his first Capri one; he has visited the island every summer for 26 years. “[The design] wanted to be simple and low-key, because that’s actually Capri,” he says, in apparent defiance of what, if you look at the street scene just beyond the hotel’s terrace bar, is plainly an extremely un-low-key assemblage of people and retail outlets.

But Sultana, and Oetker, have managed something here: separated from the movida only by some low landscaping, the terrace manages to feel just apart enough — a retreat, but not a redoubt, from the fray, a seat that doesn’t miss any of the action. As has been the case for ever at La Quisisana, Capri town’s other historic address, La Palma’s terrace is already a good place to watch the world parade by. (The good vibes were enhanced by staff, who were both excellent at their jobs and having a lot of laughs, with guests and each other — probably elated, after 2022’s welter of false starts, to finally be sharing the hotel with the public.)

Sultana’s design is, as he says, fairly low-key. It took me a day to adjust to the idea that it wasn’t only 80 per cent finished, but a real less-is-more execution of a vision. “I was trying to give it that old Hollywood-movie sense of a what a Capri hotel should be,” Sultana says.

Modest isn’t the right word, but nor is anything ostentatious. There are moments of tasteful whimsy that recall the hotel’s history, such as the frescoes he commissioned the Rome-based artist Roberto Ruspoli to paint directly on the lobby’s walls and ceiling: line-drawn ancient-Roman profiles, against washes of light-blue sky. The artist and fashion designer Allegra Hicks created the stunning embroidered tapestries that hang in the bar and in each lift foyer — Arcadian scenes of Rome and Capri, with all the attendant signals: Calabrian pines, cypresses, temple ruins, the silhouette of Vesuvius.

Around 90 per cent of the furniture, fixtures and accessories — from the brass rope-motif stair rails to the rattan-fronted wardrobes — were custom-designed by Sultana. Everything plays in the traditional Amalfi coast palette of blues and white, grading into green and lemon-yellow. The wicker chairs on the terrace are from Italian company Bonacina, the backsplash of tiles in its bar made to order in Sicily.

Indoors and out, tiny glittering mosaics in Tyrrhenian-sea shades trace geometric patterns between travertine paving stones; they climb round the sides of the Aqua bar in palm-frond patterns, and arc in great laurels across the lobby’s terrazzo floor. My top-floor room had a deep-plush rug with an abstracted palm design across it, textured turquoise lacquer panelling behind the bookshelves and — pure heaven — a wide white-on-white terrace, made totally private by tall trellises thick with fragrant jasmine.

As much as Bianca, the yet-to-open rooftop restaurant, the Oetker team is betting on Da Gioia to lend it the edge here — the only other hotel on the island with its own beach club is the Capri Palace. Da Gioia was a known quantity — not as exclusive as La Fontelina (perched right in front of the Faraglioni rock formations), nor as venerated as La Canzone del Mare (also in Marina Piccola), but with a prime, sun-saturated position and a smooth pebble, as opposed to rocky, beach.

Post the attentions of Sultana, it’s a highly polished version of its former self. White sunbeds and umbrellas line the shore below the raised restaurant, and fill the adjacent platform. Esposito’s menu is prettily plated versions of the classics everyone wants, from a light crunchy frittura and delicate seafood salads to a pezzogna all’acqua pazza for one (Tyrrhenian Sea bream, poached in broth with tiny tomatoes and olives).

Rather less delicious: the thumping club-music soundtrack, more suited to a 2am London bender than a seaside idyll, spun by a DJ in a dedicated booth. (An appeal to whoever had this idea, whether owner or management: there are vast catalogues of good ’60s and ’70s Italian pop on Spotify and the Radiooooo app. Please, mine them.)

But it was the only real black mark on an otherwise glittering, convincingly Capri afternoon, at a place that, like the hotel it’s now part of, seems to have the promise to eventually deliver on the dream.

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