CAPRI

Capri has no beach worth the name. The coast is rock, and swimming happens off wooden platforms and iron ladders bolted into the cliff — which is why the figure on this towel is standing on a deck with a handrail rather than on sand.

The Faraglioni are three limestone stacks off the south-east coast, and their order is fixed: the one attached to the shore, the one pierced by an arch you can take a boat through, and the smallest, furthest out. Get that sequence wrong and the island becomes somewhere else.

The island belongs to the Gulf of Naples, not the Amalfi Coast, which is a distinction Capri itself is firm about. The whitewash here is a warm chalk cream, the roofs are shallow barrel vaults rather than domes, and in late afternoon the limestone goes pale against a sky that turns almost rose.