There are places you go to get away from it all. And then there’s Sant’Angelo. To get to this Italian village, you take an hour-long ferry from Naples to the volcanic island of Ischia, nestled a few waves’ breadth from Capri in the heart of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Then you take a meandering hour-long bus from the island’s manicured capital, Ischia Porto, through fishing villages and hill towns, vineyards and rabbit warrens. Finally, where the car roads stop, you climb a very steep pedestrianized hill.

That’s just the way locals like it. The thousand-odd person village of Sant’Angelo, among riotous bougainvillea and parched, lizard-dotted tufa on the southern slope of the island, should by any law of touristic averages be a soulless tourist trap: its whitewashed houses and bright-painted wooden doors overrun by foreign buyers and holiday-makers, every other apartment overlooking the natural thermal pools at the garden-spa of Aphrodite Apollon listed on AirBnB.