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Relais Maresca Luxury Small Hotel
Capri, Italy · Independent · Near Luxury
The blue building you see first when the ferry docks at Marina Grande was built in 1876 as the private house of John Clay MacKowen, a Louisiana colonel turned physician who wrote the first book about Capri and put up the Casa Rossa in Anacapri. It took paying guests from 1883 and has changed its name seven times since, settling on Maresca after MacKowen's daughter Giulia married into the family. Twenty-seven rooms now, most facing the Bay of Naples, and a fourth-floor terrace restaurant where breakfast arrives with Vesuvius in the frame.
- 27 rooms
- Opened 1883
- Neighborhood: Marina Grande
- Rooms from 194 sq ft (18 m²)
About Relais Maresca Luxury Small Hotel
- Seven names in a century and a half: Hotel Bristol, Hotel du Louvre, Alexandra Miramare, Hotel Vesuvio, Hotel Royal, Mercedi Maison Bleue, and finally Maresca. No other house on Capri has rebranded so often.
- The founder fought for the Confederacy, finished a Dartmouth degree after the war and a Munich medical degree in 1876, then lived on Capri for twenty years and published the island's first monograph in 1884.
- The hotel sits about fifty metres from the ferry dock and directly opposite the funicular, roughly twenty steps from the gangway to the front desk.
- Entry-level rooms start at 194 sq ft (18 m²).
History
In 1876 John Clay MacKowen, an American from Jackson, Louisiana, built a villa on the waterfront at Marina Grande as his private house. He was an odd and well-known figure on the island: a Confederate officer in the Civil War, a Dartmouth graduate who went back to finish his degree after the fighting, a physician trained in Munich, a bibliophile and an amateur archaeologist. He wrote the first monograph on Capri, published in 1884, and he built the Casa Rossa in Anacapri around a fifteenth-century Aragonese tower, filling it with finds from Villa Jovis and the Blue Grotto. Locals called him 'ciacca e mmereca' for the speed with which he switched between temper and generosity.
The villa opened to paying guests in 1883 as the Hotel Bristol, with a ground-floor dining room called the Stanford Restaurant du Louvre. From there the name changed again and again. Hotel du Louvre in 1892, when it began working with the Hotel Pagano and the Quisisana to take guests who wanted to be at the water's edge. Alexandra Miramare in 1902, under the Dane Frido von Meyeren, with Scandinavian food in the restaurant. Hotel Vesuvio in 1908, now owned by Giulia Cimino, MacKowen's daughter by the Capri woman Maria Cimino, and married to Giovanni Maresca of a wealthy Sorrentine family. Hotel Royal during the First World War, with twenty-four beds run by their son Mario Maresca. Then Mercedi Maison Bleue, and finally, from 1937, the Maresca name for good, by which time additional floors had taken the house to its present twenty-seven rooms.
Today it trades as Relais Maresca Luxury Small Hotel. Rooms are finished in island style with ceramic tiled floors; the superior rooms all face the sea, several have private terraces with loungers, and an attic room opens onto its own roof solarium with an outdoor shower. Terrazza Maresca, the fourth-floor restaurant, serves breakfast, Mediterranean lunches and evening drinks over the Bay of Naples.
The setting
Marina Grande is Capri's working harbour and its front door: the hydrofoils and ferries from Naples and Sorrento come in here, the funicular climbs from the quay to the Piazzetta in three minutes, and the boats for the Blue Grotto leave from the same water. It is the busiest part of the island by day and one of the quietest by late evening, when the day trippers have gone and the fishing boats are the only things moving. Relais Maresca stands at the foot of the road that climbs from the port toward Capri town, directly across from the ferry ticket office, which makes it one of the few hotels on the island you can walk to with your own luggage. The beach at Marina Grande is a short stroll along the front, and Anacapri and the Casa Rossa the founder built are a bus ride up the hill.
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