ABSTRACT
W hen, in 1705, Joseph Addison declared that there was ‘certainly no Place in the World where a Man may Travel with greater Pleasure and Advantage than in Italy’, he was referring to a country whose southernmost point, as far as the tourists were concerned, was still Naples. 1 More heavily biased than his predecessors towards the ‘classic ground’ of Italy, Addison was unusual in having also visited Capri, ‘being very desirous to see a Place that had been the Retirement of Augustus for some time, and the Residence of Tiberius for several Years’. 2 In October 1700 John Dryden junior, son of the poet, had ‘rowed quite around the island’ with some friends, describing a marine cavern he called the ‘Grotta Cieca’ as ‘so romantique, that we cou'd not but fancy it belong'd to some sea god, as his court or palace’. 3
