Casa Malaparte

My house must be open to the sun, to the wind, and the voice of the sea, just like a Greek temple, and light, light, light everywhere!

The words of Axel Munthe come to mind when you see Casa Malaparte.

Tiberius, Axel Munthe, Curzio Malaparte. All three shared this love for Capri, la Isola Bella.

Says Axel Munthe, it is with joy and not with sorrow that my thoughts go back there, where I have lived the happiest years of my life. But it is true I do not like to go there myself anymore - I feel as if I were intruding upon sacred ground, sacred to a past which can never return, when the world was young and the sun was my friend.

Both Axel Munthe and Curzio Malaparte left us books. As for Tiberius, the Emperor, what we know about him is from Tacitus. It is a harsh portrait. Axel Munthe would come again and again to the same question, was Tacitus right?

The Story of San Michele was my reading companion when I was about sixteen.

I sprang from the Sorrento sailing-boat on, to the little beach. Swarms of boys were playing about among the upturned boats or bathing their shining bronze bodies in the surf, and old fishermen in red Phrygian caps sat mending their nets, outside their boathouses. I had no time to think, my head was full of rapturous wonder, my heart full of the joy of life, the world was beautiful and I was eighteen.

Just over our heads, riveted to the steep rock like an eagle's nest, stood a little ruined chapel. Its vaulted roof had fallen in, but huge blocks of masonry shaped into an unknown pattern of symmetrical network, still supported its crumbling walls. What is the name of the little chapel?, I asked eagerly? San Michele. San Michele! San Michele! echoed in my heart.

I did not know anything about Casa Malaparte. I saw it for the first time in a short film, at the Exhibition on Modernism that was hosted at the Corcoran Gallery. I was astonished by its beauty.

A narrow high cliff over the Gulf of Salerno. The sea is somewhere down, surrounding the cliff. You hear the roar of waves from all sides. Sea and sun. Access is only by boat, then you follow a long staircase cut into the mountain.

Then I found its story. Curzio Malaparte hired Adalberto Libera (an Italian Rationalist architect) to design the house. It was in 1937 or 1938.

It seems that Malaparte rejected at some point the design of Libera and went on with local stonemasons. Anyway, the original idea for the house was of Libera, a red masonry box with reverse pyramidal stairs leading to the roof patio (Wikipedia).



Curzio Malaparte would write in a letter to a friend, people who live in Capri do not know, do not realize (until they leave) the paradise they live in. I have not spent a real summer in Capri since 1938. In 1939 I was in Amalfi, back from Ethiopia, with a rheumatism on my right side that was making me suffer horribly. In 1940 I was on Mont Blanc. In 1941 I was in Russia. In 1942 I was in Lapland; and this year I am in Sweden and Finland. And at least this year, I would like to enjoy Capri's summer in my own house, before I become too old.



These views, with their austere beauty, refuting any compromise with coziness, with nicety, do they echo some parts from the interior universe of Malaparte, some of his thoughts, something he was thinking those years? The war would follow, and he would write Kaputt, and then La Pelle.

Malaparte was his adopted name. Just to distance himself from Bonaparte. Curzio Malaparte, futurist, attracted by modern values like all futurists, attracted by fascism like all futurists, keeping his independence of views and conflicting often with the regime of Mussolini, attracted after the war by communism - he embraced the whole spectrum of radical politics while keeping always his critical attitude, his distances, his independence of views.



After the death of Malaparte the house remained neglected and began to decay.

It took about thirty years till the first serious restoration was initiated.

Meanwhile, in 1963, Godard shot some scenes here, at the Casa Malaparte, for his movie, Le Mépris. It was fortunate, as it is said that the movie has a great cinematography, with well-choreographed long takes.

I haven't yet see Le Mépris, but I saw another movie that was shot in Capri, Blind Light, with Wolfgang Held as cinematographer. An unexpected gem, would say one of the people who saw it and then made this remark on imdb. I keep it as the most beautiful movie made by Pola Rapaport.






















Look at these two images: the greatness of an Aztec pyramid!

Nothing than trees and fantastic vegetation, sea, wind with the terrible roar of waves, sun or fog or frightening darkness of night; and Casa Malaparte with the severe greatness of an Aztec pyramid: this is the place for Epiphany.




(Avangarda 20)