Most people hear about the tiny volcanic island of Ischia from an Italian, whispered like a secret. Just across the water from the Amalfi Coast, and an hour by boat from Naples, Ischia is the summer-holiday island for Neapolitans who have been coming here for generations – and yet it remains relatively unheard of among British visitors, overshadowed by its glitzy sister island of Capri.

Capri may hog the limelight, but Ischia has always been fought over, desired for its beauty, its fertile soils and healing thermal springs, its excellent vineyards (the Romans, after they wrestled it from the Greeks, renamed it Enaria, or ‘Land of Wine’) and strategic position in the Bay of Naples.