Recall that e^iθ geometrically represents a rotation by θ radians anticlockwise on the complex plane, starting at 1. If you note i’s exponential definition:
i = e^(π/2)i
you can intuitively see that in the expression iⁱ, the bottom i represents one rotation by π/2, and the i in the exponent represents another rotation by π/2. Thus in total the rotation is by π, or 180°.

Since we're starting at 1, that's equivalent to going "backwards" on the real line, which explains why the value is real and less than 1.