A ROMAN EMPEROR'S GROTTO
The Blue Grotto's Roman Past: Tiberius and Sunken Statues
Long before tour boats and rowboats, the Blue Grotto had a Roman life — tied to Emperor Tiberius, statues pulled from its floor and centuries of local legend.
See Capri boat tours on GetYourGuide ↗Capri, the emperor's island
In AD 27, the Roman emperor Tiberius left Rome for Capri and effectively ran the empire from the island for the last decade of his reign, reportedly never returning to the mainland. He is said to have built a dozen villas across Capri, the grandest being Villa Jovis on the island's eastern cliffs, whose ruins still stand today. An emperor with that much time, wealth and privacy on a small island naturally drew attention to its coastline's more remarkable features — and a sea cave glowing blue on Capri's north-west shore would have been hard to ignore.
A private swimming grotto for an emperor
Local tradition holds that the Blue Grotto served as a nymphaeum — a private, semi-sacred swimming and bathing grotto — connected to Tiberius's clifftop retreats, reachable by a stairway and passage cut into the rock above. Roman builders were fond of dramatic, half-natural bathing spaces, and a glowing sea cave on the emperor's own island fits that taste closely. What may be an ancient landing point and carved niches for statues are still described in the cave, though most of what once decorated it has long since been removed or lost to the sea.
Statues that surfaced in 1964
In 1964, a set of Roman-era marble statues was recovered from the grotto's floor, including figures identified with Poseidon and Triton, sea deities that fit naturally with a grotto used for bathing and worship. The find gave real physical weight to the old stories linking the cave to Roman use, rather than leaving them as guesswork from ancient texts alone. The recovered statues are now kept in the Casa Rossa museum in Anacapri, on the clifftop above the grotto itself, rather than left in the cave — visitors today see an empty cavern, its Roman decoration relocated to dry land.
Centuries of fear before it was 'rediscovered'
For much of the time between the Roman era and the 19th century, the grotto seems to have slipped out of common knowledge, kept alive mainly as local superstition — Capri fishermen are said to have avoided the cave, associating it with witches and sea spirits rather than emperors. Its modern rediscovery is usually credited to 1826, when a German writer and a Capri fisherman are said to have paddled in and reported the sight to the outside world, after which it quickly became a fixture of the Grand Tour. The Romans, in other words, found it first — Europe found it twice.
Why so little of that history is visible today
Visitors expecting Roman ruins inside the grotto will find none — the cave itself is just water, rock and light, with no statues, columns or inscriptions left in place. What Roman evidence survives is scattered: some carved niches and a possible landing platform, the statues in Anacapri's museum, and the ruins of Tiberius's villas elsewhere on the island, most now reduced to low walls and foundations rather than intact buildings. The grotto's Roman story is something you carry in with you rather than see on the rock walls — worth knowing before you go, since nothing at the entrance itself explains any of it.
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