We’d dreamed of visiting Ischia for years.
It started, as it often does, with a handful of photographs: images that seemed to capture something timeless. Moored boats in a quiet bay, striped umbrellas on dark sand, bronzed shoulders turned to the sun, and that soft, honeyed light that clings to summer in southern Italy.
Frames distilled everything we imagined the island might be – gentle days, sea air, and that unmistakable dolce vita ease.
And Ischia seemed to have it all. A volcanic island dotted with natural hot springs, faded seaside towns, long lunches by the water, and that gently crumbling glamour we’ve come to love in other parts of Italy. We pictured scooter rides along quiet coastal roads, swims off the rocks, and small discoveries around every corner: the sort of place where everything unfolds at exactly the pace you need.
But if we’re honest, it didn’t quite land.
That’s not to say it isn’t beautiful. The pastel buildings of Sant’Angelo glowing in the late afternoon sun, the sky turning to fire as it slips behind Forio, Castello Aragonese rising from the water at the end of its narrow stone causeway – it all stops you for a moment, just like we hoped it might.
But, as veterans of several Italian summers now, Ischia was the closest we’d come to a resort destination in the country. Pleasant and easy, but missing that layer of everyday life, grit or eccentricity that tends to draw us in elsewhere in southern Italy. The towns are neat, polished and, despite having a large local population, geared towards a certain type of tourism.
It also felt, at times, like a destination aimed at a more mature, traditional crowd – perhaps because of the spa culture, its botanical merits, or just the general pace of life. The energy was soft, slow, overwhelmingly older, and skewed a little more northern rather than southern European. We didn’t quite find the atmosphere we tend to connect with when travelling in Italy summer but, given we’d just come from its little sister island of Procida, perhaps unfair comparisons were always going to be made.
Still – and this part matters – we’re glad we went.
Because Ischia certainly had its moments.
Taking a boat out across the water, slipping between beaches under a hot, open sky. A final hour in a thermal spa, surrounded by locals speaking a dialect we couldn’t follow but found oddly comforting all the same. The foil-wrapped eggplant parmigiana from the tiny cafeteria near our apartment, so good we…
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