Handpicked experience · Rome
Rome, Italy
The famous blue arrives through a submerged window, not the entrance; you are hauled in lying flat on a chain; and Rome used the cave as a bathing chamber.
Explore the quaint and beautiful town of Anacapri on the island of Capri
Walk through this historic town and relax while being surrounded by the peace and quiet of the sea
Enter the Blue Grotto and experience its mesmerizing glowing waters
Land at the Marina Grande and admire the beautiful architecture as you embark on an island getaway
Admission to the Blue Grotto covered
An English-speaking guide with you on the island
Lunch provided during the day on Capri
Every transfer and ferry between Rome, Naples and the island arranged
A fourteen-hour day that starts in Rome and ends on Capri and back, with the Blue Grotto included, a guide waiting on the island and a meal in the middle of it. Nothing needs organising once you have booked. It is a long way to go for a small cave, and it is worth it.
You are collected in Rome and driven south to the coast, roughly three hours, then cross by ferry. On the island a guide takes you through the towns and the viewpoints, lunch is provided, and the grotto is visited when conditions allow. The return runs the same way in reverse, arriving back in Rome late. Most of the day is travel; the island portion is the part you came for.
The cave mouth is barely a metre high, far too small to light anything. The colour comes from a second opening, much larger, sitting underwater directly below it. Sunlight passes through that submerged window, and the seawater strips out the reds along the way, so what arrives inside is pure blue light coming up through the water rather than in from the entrance. Anything below the surface — an oar, a hand — turns silver.
Visitors transfer into small rowing boats at the entrance and lie flat while the oarsman hauls the boat through on a chain bolted into the rock. It takes seconds. The whole operation depends on the sea being nearly flat, because a swell of even a few centimetres closes the mouth entirely, and that is decided on the morning, not in advance.
The entrance is so low because the sea is higher up the rock than it used to be. This coast has subsided by roughly six metres over the last two thousand years, and the evidence is inside the cave: a rock-cut landing stage and the lower steps of an ancient stairway now sit below the waterline, drowned where they were once dry. What is now a slot you must lie down to pass through was, when it was cut, a comfortable doorway.
Before a road was blasted along the cliff face in the 1870s, the only link between the harbour and the upper town was a staircase of some nine hundred steps carved into the rock, probably by the Greeks. Everything that reached Anacapri went up on somebody's back or head — water, wine, building stone, mail. The staircase is still there and still walkable, and the women who carried loads up it were paid by the trip.
Fourteen hours means an early start and a late return, with about six of them spent travelling. The grotto can close without warning when the sea gets up, in which case the rest of the island continues as planned. Cancellation is free up to a day ahead.
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About six, split between the drive south from Rome and the ferry each way. The rest is spent on the island with a guide, at lunch and at the grotto.
Because the light does not come through the visible entrance. A much larger opening sits underwater below it, and seawater filters the red out of the sunlight passing through, leaving blue light rising through the water.
By transferring into a small rowing boat and lying flat while the oarsman pulls the boat through the metre-high mouth on a chain fixed into the rock.
Any swell at all shuts the entrance, and that call is made on the morning. The rest of the island day — the guide, the towns, the viewpoints and lunch — carries on as planned.
Because the coast has sunk about six metres in two thousand years. A rock-cut landing stage and the bottom of an ancient stairway inside the cave now lie underwater, showing that the opening was a normal doorway when it was made.
In 1826, when a German writer persuaded a local fisherman to row him in and then published an account of it. Before that the cave had been left alone for centuries.
A staircase of around nine hundred rock-cut steps, likely Greek in origin, which was the only route between the harbour and the upper town until a road was blasted through in the 1870s.