Casa Malaparte, Capri, 1938–42 by Adalberto Libera
One of a series of short accounts of innovative houses from 1500 to the present prepared for an unrealised book.
The island of Capri, lying off the Sorrentine Peninsula in the shadow of Vesuvius in the Tyrrhenian Sea, has always been a place of retreat. The island has been inhabited since ancient times. During the first century AD, the Emperor Tiberius built himself no less than twelve villas on the island, seeking a refuge from the political intrigues of Rome. Tiberius’ villas included the colossal and wonderfully preserved Villa Jovis, standing high above the island’s north-east corner, where he ruled the empire for the last decade of his life. In the nineteenth century the island became a popular holiday resort attracting the rich and the famous — which continues today. But away from the hustle and bustle of the two main town centres, just a few minutes walk finds tranquility, and a little further almost complete seclusion. It was in such a place, on one of the island’s near inaccessible rocky promontories, that the Curzio Malaparte built what would become one of the crowning achievements of mid-war Mediterranean Modernism.
Malaparte was a writer and disaffected fascist, who in 1933 was confined by Mussolini’s regime to the island of Lipari off Sicily. Upon his release in 1938 he was determined to remain detached — psychologically and politically — and acquired a remote site on Capri. He commissioned the architect Adalberto Libera to draw up plans for villa that would stretch the length of the promontory, perched amid a few trees clinging on for dear life high above the waves. Libera was one of the leading architects of Italian Modernism. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, the Italian Modern Movement never lost touch the legacy of Ancient Roman classical architecture, a legacy acutely felt in this site due to proximity of both Tiberius’ palace and, the other side of the Bay of Naples, the excavated Roman town of Pompeii. This played an important role in the design of Malaparte’s new villa.
The house is reached by a meandering path cut into the sharp rocks that are peppered by hardy plants and wild flowers growing between the cracks. Oblong in shape with a tapered end, the house espouses geometry complexity. Windows of different shapes and different angles create carefully framed views of the exterior, from close-up views of rock formations or of particular trees to the sea’s seemingly infinite azure expanse that’s brought right into the house. At the tapering end a staircase is built into the roof of the house, carrying you up to an open terrace where one can freely comprehend the full sweep of the coastline. A white windbreak, a little like those by Le Corbusier, curves across the terrace. It is an avowedly Modern aspect to the open expanse, which like the rest of the house is rendered in Pompeiian russet hues, and otherwise evokes of a distant, eternal past. This is a house that invites metaphysical contemplation. To find anything that approaches a parallel one must look towards the work of the Italian painter, Giorgio de Chirico, in whose Surrealist dreamscapes the past similarly mingles with an undefined present in spaces of sharp, crystalline beauty.
© Owen Hopkins 2018
