Procida

Where it sits. Procida is the smallest of the three main islands in the Bay of Naples, covering about four square kilometres between Ischia and the mainland at Cape Miseno, roughly 20 kilometres from Naples itself. It is volcanic but flat by the standards of its neighbours — the highest point is 91 metres — because it is not a single cone but the overlapping remains of four low craters of the Phlegraean field, eroded into a lobed outline of bays and headlands. The adjoining islet of Vivara, a perfect half-crater linked by a bridge, is a protected nature reserve. Around ten thousand people live on Procida, which makes it one of the most densely populated islands in the Mediterranean, and unlike Capri or Ischia it has never rebuilt itself around tourism: the economy still runs substantially on fishing and on merchant seafaring, and the island has long supplied ships' officers to the Italian fleet.

The story behind it. The layered pastel architecture is a working vernacular, not a design decision: houses were built with vaulted ground-floor boat stores, external staircases and wide arched loggias facing the water, and painted in different colours so that fishermen could pick out their own from the sea. The Terra Murata, the walled upper town on the island's highest point, holds the abbey of San Michele Arcangelo, founded in the eleventh century and rebuilt repeatedly, and the Palazzo d'Avalos, a sixteenth-century noble residence that became a prison in 1830 and held inmates until 1988 — an enormous, gaunt complex that still dominates the skyline and is now open for guided visits. Elsa Morante set her 1957 novel L'isola di Arturo here, with the palazzo at its centre. Procida served as Italian Capital of Culture in 2022.

On screen. Procida carries one of the most loved of all Italian films. Il Postino (1994), directed by Michael Radford from Antonio Skármeta's novel, was shot largely on the island: Marina Corricella provides the fishing harbour, and the beach at Pozzo Vecchio, on the northwest coast, is where the postman Mario cycles along the sand and where the film's closing scenes were staged — it is signposted locally as the Spiaggia del Postino. The production also worked on Salina in the Aeolian Islands, which supplied the house of the exiled Pablo Neruda and much of the film's other coastline, so the picture's imagined island is a composite of two real ones nearly four hundred kilometres apart. Massimo Troisi, who played Mario and co-wrote the script, delayed heart surgery to finish the shoot and died of a heart attack on 4 June 1994, the day after filming ended. Five years later Anthony Minghella used Procida and Ischia for the invented resort of Mongibello in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Laura Bispuri filmed her adaptation of Morante's novel on the island in 2021.

What you actually see today. Marina Corricella is the set piece: a crescent of vaulted houses in ochre, rose and blue rising in tiers under the Terra Murata, with no road access, reached by stairways from above or by boat. Marina Grande, also called Sancio Cattolico, is the ferry port and the everyday face of the island. Chiaiolella, on the south side, has the second harbour, the beaches at Ciraccio and Chiaia, and the bridge to Vivara. The Good Friday procession of the Mysteries, in which tableaux built by island families are carried down from the Terra Murata at dawn, is the most serious event in the local calendar and fills the island.

Getting there and timing. Ferries and hydrofoils run from Naples — Molo Beverello for the fast boats, Calata Porta di Massa for car ferries — in roughly 25 to 60 minutes, and from Pozzuoli in about half an hour, with connections to Ischia. Bringing a car is restricted for non-residents in summer and pointless in any season: the island is crossed in twenty minutes by the small local buses, by microtaxi, or on foot. Steep stairways link the harbours to the upper town, so step-free movement is very limited. May, June and September are the strong months; August is the Neapolitan holiday peak and the island is full; winter is quiet, damp and largely shut, but the Corricella light in February is extraordinary and entirely private.

What to know before going. Procida rewards slowness and punishes a schedule. There is no headline monument, no archaeological site of the first rank and no famous beach; what it has is a lived-in island that happens to be beautiful, and the standard mistake is to arrive on a morning hydrofoil, walk to Corricella, photograph it and leave on the afternoon boat. An overnight changes the experience entirely, because the day trippers go and the harbours revert to the fishermen. The lemons here are the enormous, thick-pithed pane variety, served in salad with oil and chilli rather than juiced, and the local lingua di bue pastry is worth seeking out at the bakeries around Marina Grande.