Hotel La Minerva

Every island has a family that never sold. On Capri it is the Espositos of Via Occhio Marino, a lane off Via Tragara a few minutes' walk from the Piazzetta. In the early twentieth century Luigi Esposito and Laura Cannavale, whose family had kept inns since the mid nineteenth century, let two rooms of their house to travellers. The house grew downhill, level by level, and today the third generation, Antonino, Luigi and Marco with their mother Giovanna, run nineteen rooms and still treat the place as a home with guests in it.

The architecture is the old Capri vocabulary: cross vaults, sweeping arches, hand-painted majolica floors, terraces draped in bougainvillea. Most rooms have a terrace or balcony facing the sea; the Deluxe rooms add a sea-view bathroom, and the Emma Premier Room on the lowest level, once the owners' own quarters, opens almost onto the pool. That pool sits on a terrace that seems to hang over the drop, wrapped in a garden of lemon trees that Luigi's father, a floriculturist, would recognise.

Breakfast is on the roof, with the Certosa di San Giacomo below, Monte Solaro across the valley and the sea beyond, and it is homemade: lemon marmalade, torta caprese, whatever the kitchen baked that morning. The hotel holds a Michelin Key, which for a house of this size says something about consistency rather than grandeur.