The Dogs of Capri
I The Selfie House
Curzio Malaparte didn’t bark at the moon, but at the dogs on this island. He recounts, in Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, that he learned to talk to dogs when he was banished in the thirties to Lipari, one of the Aeolian Islands, Sicily’s younger sisters: “I didn’t have anyone else to talk to.” He would go up to the terrace of his gloomy house by the sea and spend long hours “barking at the dogs, who answered me, and the fishermen of Marina Corte called me the dog.”
He continued to do that in Paris, in 1947, after fourteen years in Italian exile, where he was punished and imprisoned time and time again by Mussolini’s regime, whose first steps he had supported as intensely as he would reject them later on. But he was answered only by the cats on the Rue Galilée: “I had to stop talking to the cats in the language of dogs, because the cats didn’t like that, and insulted me.”
But above all, it was here in Capri where the author of Kaputt barked and barked and went on barking, even though the islanders called him a madman and complained to the American soldiers, who asked him to stop doing it. But when Malaparte asked to see Admiral Morse, the officer in charge, he was told: “You have the right to bark, if you want to, because Italy is now a free country. Mussolini has gone. You may bark.”
Is all this really true? I wonder as I disembark after the hour-long ferry journey from Naples. Compulsive liar and narcissist are two of the adjectives that tend to accompany the name Kurt Erich Suckert, born in Tuscany in 1898 of a German father and an Italian mother, who died exactly sixty years ago, whose pseudonym was an ironic riff on Napoleon’s surname, and whose profoundly European life and work were contradictory and extraordinary: half chronicle and half novel, half incredible experiences and likely imaginings; a life narrated by himself in the key of what for the last forty years we have known as autofiction—a form he practised long before anyone else.
These crowds are very real; they give me a lacklustre welcome. A travel writer knows that a reader isn’t interested in tourism. So I won’t describe what’s hitting the port at nine in the morning: the people queuing up to get on the ferries to Ischia, Sorrento, or Naples; the queue forming for the excursion to the Grotta Azzurra, or to get the cable car that, for two euros, takes you to the town of Capri or the convertible taxi that follows the same zigzagging route in the same amount of time, for twenty euros plus tip.
I’ll switch paragraphs, and, via the art of ellipsis, I’m already on the path that will take me to a cinematic panorama, to a mythical house, when seen from afar. I’ve come in search of dogs and a gaze. The grandchildren of the dogs with which Malaparte conversed and the gaze that led me to his house. That house led me to a path. And that path, according to the map just given me by the Capri tourist office, links the house that was filmed with the one that never made it into the movies.
The gaze belongs to Godard: for Contempt, his 1963 film, he shot several scenes in the Villa Malaparte; but what caught my eye isn’t there, but in the distance. Two men wearing hats are walking along a terraced path that’s shaded by a compact arbour. The camera follows them down until suddenly it makes a movement no spectator could anticipate: it swerves to the right and shows the big red house, the stone submarine moored on top of a distant cliff.
And the two tiny figures on the terrace, which is also red and looks like a landing strip: one stays there, the other goes down the stairs. It was cinema meant to be seen in the cinema: whenever I pressed play on my computer, the silhouettes of the man and the woman gradually fused, chameleon-like, with their own pixels.
The house that was never filmed, on the other hand, is much less famous and much more discreet: Pablo Neruda stayed there in the winter months he spent on the island with Matilde Urrutia, in the early fifties. When the film Il Postino was shot almost half a century later, the island had become too touristy, had changed too much for it to resemble the island the Chilean poet had known. Michael Radford and his team filmed elsewhere, and the screenplay forgot to mention the word “Capri.”
Journeys being what happens while you make other travel plans, the first thing I notice on the path that should take me to the two houses I’ve come to see is a third, unexpected house. A travel writer knows that travellers invented the digression. According to the blue letters on a white plaque, Marguerite Yourcenar lived at number 4, Traversa Croce, in 1938. She wrote that every island is a microcosm, a universe in miniature.
Next door they’ve set up a shop selling typical products from Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Russia, Bulgaria, and Moldova. Capri has been a refuge for all manner of outsiders over the past centuries. The sophisticated lesbian friends, intellectuals, and artists, for example, who appear in the inter-war novel Extraordinary Women (1928) by Compton Mackenzie, who was one of their husbands (his wife, Faith, had an affair with the pianist Renata Borgatti). And opium smokers and addicts to everything, with Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen at their centre, were portrayed in Roger Peyrefitte’s The Exile of Capri (1959).
Nationless and multilingual like Tangiers, both off-limits and safe haven, oasis and hell, Capri has always played with its advantage of being surrounded by blue. Societies spawn norms that aim, implacably, to catch out any deviant. But until that moment comes, all deviants, original minds, and free souls, all addicts and wayout eccentrics, try to make the most of the parentheses.
Yourcenar wrote her novel Coup de Grâce in 1938, but she spent the previous year with the American Grace Frick on a honeymoon crossing Italy from north to south, the details of which will be revealed in 2037, when it will finally be possible to read their correspondence (they never imagined we’d be ready for them several decades earlier). Marguerite Yourcenar, by the way, was the pseudonym of Marguerite de Crayencour. Literature, like journeying, is a bit of a bal masqué.
The travel writer knows he is a body walking under an ever more blistering sun, and as he has left his hat in his Naples hotel, he asks a couple of American tourists who are walking hand in hand along the same path for sunblock. Once I’ve smeared my skull, I leave Via Sopramonte and go down Via Matermania, which offers a lookout point at each bend. After turning onto Arco Naturales—a frame around a blue-white canvas—I pass through pine trees following a steep series of solid, cement steps on this island that, though built up, is nevertheless stunning.
At a certain point, despite not having a hat, I suddenly become one of the two hatted men walking down, my every step a still shot from a film, because it’s only been fifty years, and films travel at the speed of light. Voilà, there is the antediluvian red submarine: the Casa come me.
Malaparte fell in love with Capri in 1936, at the age of thirty-eight, when he already had a literary oeuvre that included novels like Sodoma e Gomorra ( “Sodom and Gomorrah,” 1931), essays like Intelligenza di Lenin ( “Lenin’s Intelligence,” 1930), or non-fiction works like The Technique of Revolution (1931), as well as his experience at the front as a journalist, diplomat, and conspirator. When he decided to erect a self-portrait in the form of a home, he bought the Cape Masullo promontory from a fisherman.
Capri’s architectural norm was possibly set by writer, engineer, and mayor Edwin Cerio, organizer of the 1922 “Convegno sul Paesaggio” (“Conference on the Landscape”), which set the stylistic line (Mediterranean whiteness and simplicity) that still predominates on the island. But the house I have come to see is a monster or deviant or free soul; that selfie in a concave mirror, that red, straight-lined futurist manifesto, that Casa come me, because it is part of the bibliography of a great artist and appears in Godard’s film. La Villa Malaparte, built between 1938 and 1942, was designed by architect Adalberto Libera, but is in reality almost entirely the progeny of its owner and master.
From that flat roof reached by a Homeric stairway, Malaparte looked out an infinite number of times, like a captain on his prow, and always saw the same legendary landscape, though with thousands of variants, because he didn’t believe in history, and hence in pre-Christian and Christian worlds, the eruption of Vesuvius and the splendours of Pompeii, Virgil and Leopardi and Pliny the Elder, Andromeda in tears and chained to a rock, Perseus slaughtering a monster and his Malapartian sisters, the sirens, could all coexist on those crags, those islands, that coast.
Fascist and communist writers, American and Italian actresses, spies, consuls and military from the whole of Europe, and lovers were all on that improbable terrace. Only eight guests could fit around Malaparte’s table; eight was also the maximum number that could stay there: the house was an island within the island. I’m now looking at it from the vantage point as Godard’s camera.
It was mainly him and his dog on that terrace, alone with his dog, and as lonely as a dog. That’s what we see in most of the photos that have been preserved: crossed arms, begloved hands aiming at the sky, astride a racing bike, preparing to pedal from New York to San Francisco in 1955; and with his various dogs, in his arms, on his legs, being stroked, ears down, in black and white. I press play in my head again and Brigitte Bardot is sunbathing there on that terrace, face down, nude, a book of black-and-white photos barely covering her buttocks.
And under that legendary roof, opposite the picture window in the lounge, over twenty years after he died, via the magic art of the play button, Malaparte repeats what he said in The Skin, but this time with the body and voice of Marcello Mastroianni, who plays him in the 1981 film adaptation: “He asked me if I’d bought the house as it was or if I myself had designed and built it. I replied—though it wasn’t true—that I’d bought it as it was. And I flourished my hand and pointed to the wall of Matromania, the three colossal reefs under the cliffs, the Sorrento peninsula, the Siren Islands, the distant blue of the Amalfi coast and remote splendour of the coast of Paestum, and told him: ‘I designed the landscape.’”
I’m happy simply to imitate Godard’s tracking shot without a hat, and to continue to perch on this crag by the side of the road, because that’s the most I can aspire to: according to people in Naples and various web pages I consulted, you cannot visit the house. That’s why I’ve studied the scenes from Contempt and The Skin and the YouTube videos and photos that show those inaccessible interiors over and over again. The Abyssinian masks, Finnish carpets, paintings, and desk that are no longer there. The portrait by Campigli, the impressive fireplace, the great bas-relief by Pericle Fazzini, and above all, the natural landscapes framed by the windows, which are still there.
People who stayed in the house say Malaparte led a spartan life, with little attachment to the objects he collected there. He liked most to look at the sublime coast and sea, whether it was sunny or stormy. He also wrote and read and ate and fucked and watched television. It’s as well to remember him like this at the end of the paragraph: hugging his dog, letting the waves sweep over him; waves that, at the peak of the storm, flooded the ground floor and spattered white, bubbly foam over the red roof, suddenly a muddy, matte submarine submerging, spying.
I’ve been here all alone for forty minutes taking photos (just one American couple walked by who asked me what that “weird house” was, and I told them and they reacted, wow, very interesting, thank you, bye) when suddenly two pixels appear, or perhaps three.
Yes: three pixels leave the house and go down the stone stairs to the landing-point. They could be a Hollywood couple: I can’t see their faces, but they move glamorously, she with her white picture hat, he with his white panama, she in a white dress, he in black shorts and sky-blue shirt, she with a beach bag, he with a small suitcase on wheels. Someone accompanies them to the waiting launch carrying two suitcases that he hands over to the captain, fisherman, or taxi-driver. The couple board and say goodbye. The third person bids them farewell. And suddenly there is a dog at his feet, a little dog barking goodbye, that I can’t hear, but can imagine.
The launch sets off, leaving only its frothy wake. The third person and little dog walk back up the steps.
Who can they be? Their steps cease to be stills and become what they always were: heartbeats. I walk off and the film-take and house stay behind.
I check my iPhone screen to confirm that I’ve taken a good selfie with his perfect selfie in the background. And I keep walking.
II Under the Volcano
In The Skin, Curzio Malaparte invokes two geographical and symbolic totems: Capri and Vesuvius. Scenes are set in both places, which are constantly referred to. The narrator talks about the island and volcano, as he wanders through the city and along the coast, as if they were two corners of his own personal Bermuda triangle: the third is Naples.
A raw, sarcastic, distorted deconstruction of the American occupation of southern Italy, with the author himself acting as the unifying thread and translator between locals and allied troops, The Skin has to be the great Neapolitan novel. Naturally, Neapolitans didn’t greet it as such. The author was persona non grata for a long time. Benedetto Croce publicly regretted having promoted The Skin, which was included in the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books.
From Lipari Island—where he was under house arrest and learned to bark—you can see Vulcano Island: Malaparte’s destiny was those volcanoes and islands. From my base at UNA Hotel Napoli, surrounded by a market that rises at dawn and disappears in the afternoon—hoarse, bawling stall owners, a pungent stink of fish—I could see both the Circumvesuviana Station and Vesuvius, dormant since 1944, when it had the last of its twenty lethal eruptions. At present, over three million people live within its threatening range.
In the first century—when it awoke for the first time, there wasn’t even a word for volcano in Latin. The Romans simply thought of Vesuvius as a green mountain, which is why, when it began to give off smoke, Pliny the Elder tried to get near it to inspect the strange phenomenon: the rest is lava and silence. Those who died in the year 79, buried by pumice stone, gases, ash, and an earth in flames, never understood why they died. Reality doesn’t exist if it’s not preceded by language. And a journey is meaningless if one can’t find the right words to describe it.
A travel writer must have a “fixer” in every port. Oppressed by the muggy heat, I called mine in Naples and he told me to leave all that and come here. A freshly shaven Raimondo greeted me, stooping slightly. He was wearing a sea-blue Lacoste polo sweater and the ironic look of a connoisseur, his hands in his pockets. He has never let me down, I don’t know what I’ll do when he finally decides to retire: he got what I wanted in just under twenty-four hours. He carefully took it out from under the counter, and, with the emotion of someone handling a valuable consignment, announced: “I had to fetch it from Sergio Attanasio’s, it was the only way to get it.”
In exchange, I gave him what he’d asked for, said goodbye with a “Ci vediamo dopo,” and then went searching for traces of another traveller, Giacomo Leopardi, because that’s what we chroniclers do: we’re always following in the footsteps of others. Years before he started on a series of journeys that would end with his death in this city, he wrote his most future-laden poem, “The Infinite.” A poem that speaks of the horizon as the frontier between two abysses. He was very young when he wrote it, he had yet to travel, but his entire life can be seen as an extended steeplechase, with obstacles every hundred yards and a different horizon after every jump.
I walked into Virgiliano Park. On my left, the lines of the Napoli Margellina Station vanished from my sight and entered the company of antique streetlights, the shade of cypresses, the smell of pinetrees, and warbling of birds, as I walked up a zigzagging path that leads to the lump of marble that recalls that the great romantic poet is buried there.
A security camera registered my presence. And a fire extinguisher next to the marble stone reminded me how absurd that whole commemoration was: the poet died in the middle of a cholera epidemic, his remains were lost forever in a common grave and his verse is all that is left of Leopardi’s DNA.
But I carried on up, and was suddenly hit by a wave of cold air coming from an abandoned tunnel drilled through the hill. Its cathedral-like entrance was home to another extinguisher and a dozen pigeons—fluttering and cooing—who had nested in the hollows within that feat of Roman engineering, an astonishing tunnel that crosses the Posillipo hill, seven hundred metres long, five high, and four-and-a-half across, like the maw of a mythological wolf.
Tradition lies yet again: Virgil didn’t commission the construction of this tunnel; it was the work of Lucius Cocceius Auctus, and it has endured over centuries thanks to various modernizations implemented by worthies like Alfonso V “The Magnanimous” or Joseph Bonaparte. Since the end of the nineteenth century, it's been waiting for a mayor to rival those predecessors. The pigeons cooed on one side and then the other, like lost souls. And the extinguisher reminded me that the powers that be like to go through the motions (it’s been almost two millennia since the empire disintegrated).
Elsewhere in the hill, in a modest hollow of a few metres, is the grotto housing (according to that great liar, tradition) Virgil’s tomb, back in the wave of heat. Temporarily shut by construction. Rusted scaffolding. Cobwebbed grating. Pigeon shit on the closure notice, perhaps from the same bird resting, corpse-like, in the darkness of that hostile, grandiose interior.
Three security cameras aimed—respectively—at the Virgilian crypt, the mouth of the tunnel, and the path I’d just climbed up. I wondered whether they and the screens might be connected, whether somebody was watching me writing notes on my pad that, with a bit of luck, might be transformed into this text.
I retraced my steps and, before leaving, went over to the guards’ hut by the entrance: the television screen was lit and alternatively showed black-and-white close-ups of the monuments with nobody present: the lump of marble, the worn-out engineering, and the shat-upon grotto. A thin, uniformed functionary was watching an afternoon soap on the other screen. His plump colleague was checking Facebook on his cellphone.
Booksellers are dealers. They’re also Virgilian. Without the local guides who show you what’s not on Wikipedia, travel writing is meaningless. I went back to Dante & Descartes, my Ithacan bookshop in Naples—whose slogan is “Books Lost and Refound”—to pick up Raimondo and go eat cod. He’d found me another book I needed for my trip to Capri in search of two houses, two writers, two films, and one chronicle.
He gave it to me as a present, along with Erri De Luca’s Napòlide (one of my writer-friend’s books published by Di Maio himself). In De Luca’s The Day Before Happiness, there is in fact a bookseller character, Don Raimondo. “He doesn’t live here, does he?” I asked, and he replied, “he left some time ago, but he often comes back and stays at my place. Not long ago he gave a talk in Scampia, the neighbourhood that appears as a drug hell in the Gomorrah series, though it’s actually full of cultural associations, especially those linked to music, and lots of youngsters who don’t belong to the Camorra and don’t ever aspire to.”
Roberto Saviano launched his first book, Gomorrah, in Dante & Descartes, a reportage on the Camorra before it became a bestseller, film, play, and television series as well as his death sentence. He now lives in hiding in the United States. Giacomo Leopardi was persecuted by fanatical Catholics who contested his anti-dogmatic philosophy. Matilde Serao also had problems with her searing chronicle Il ventre di Napoli (“The Belly of Naples,” 1884), and the polemic spawned by the publication of Anna Maria Ortese’s Neapolitan Chronicles (1953) went on for decades. Although the city also inspires admiration, tenderness, and even complicity, it seems quite impossible to write about Naples without taking up a scalpel or drill.
“I occasionally exchange a few words with Roberto,” Raimundo told me on our way to the restaurant. He then asked, “Do you mind if we take this side street for a moment?” Isn’t that what journeys are? I thought as we left Via Mezzocannone and entered the alleyways of the town’s historic centre.
“It’s here on this corner,” he continued a few minutes later, pointing to 22, Donnalbina, “that I opened my original bookshop in 1984, and it was an immediate, if modest, success.” He said he’d tell me the reason for his good luck later, nervously using air quotes as he uttered the word “luck.”
We walked a few hundred yards down the cobbled street, flanked by grandiose but crumbling facades—how the garbage stank under that sun!—until we stopped on the top part of the Pendino di Santa Barbara. It was a passageway with steps that one entered and exited under arches, its walls illustrating Naples’s stratified history: from the Greco-Roman stones that were re-used by medieval masons and that go back to Parthenope—the Greek settlement named after a siren—to the small chapels lit by fluorescent lights and covered in graffiti.
“This is where Malaparte invents the most evocative, bizarre hyperrealist images that you find in The Skin, where a legion of prostitute dwarves offer their services on the steps of this passageway,” my bookseller-guide told me. Hands on hips, with the expression of a bumptious elf, Raimondo recounted how the fiction was based on historical fact: that narrow passage, which had never seen a sunbeam, really had been home to a community of women who were dwarfish, due not to genetics, but to rickets and extreme poverty.
It wasn’t hard to imagine—in the midday heat with that patina of dirt—those women whose poverty forced them to “reveal their dark sex among the rosy glow of naked flesh,” while they shouted “Five dollars! Five dollars!” at the black soldiers, then closed their legs the moment the men disappeared. It is the least-shocking sequence in a novel where a father is paid to expose his virgin daughter’s vagina and where a fish that might be a siren or a dead girl is served up at an aristocratic dinner.
Contemporary literature loves to recreate myths and origin-stories: in the beginning, Capri was home to the sirens and Parthenope’s corpse reached the beaches of Naples after her quarrel with Ulysses. But in truth, mythology blurs or even forgets origins: Homer’s sirens had the face of a woman but the body of a bird, not a fish. The Disney version merely expands on a tradition that began in the Middle Ages of transforming sirens into sex objects.
The real sirens were strident, horrendous monsters. Norman Douglas—the author of South Wind (1917)—was deported from Italy for pederasty (although he managed to return to Capri to commit suicide). And Malaparte, what can one say about his monstrous side?
“Here too there is a long tradition of dwarf books,” Raimondo told me later, as we tucked into our plates of cod carpaccio. They were first printed in Naples when printing was born, thanks to a nomadic German publisher by the name of Mattia Moravio. “It has continued to this day,” he explained, taking from his bag some of the mini-books he has published, and adding: “But the modern tradition began with the weekly publications from the Lillipuziana Library in 1892, the brainchild of Luigi Chiurazzi. He was the one who transformed the production of tiny format books into a distinctively Neapolitan product.”
Don Raimondo is the living memory of the art of the book in Naples, this textual—and so often textualized—city. For years he has been threatening to collect, in an infinite volume, all the articles he has written on the publishers, printers, librarians, and booksellers of Naples. “When Il Postino was premiered, the centre of the city was immediately filled with pirate editions of Antonio Skármeta’s novel,” he told me before ordering a rhum baba. And continued; “But rather than being signed by him, they were signed by Massimo Troisi, the lead actor who had just died: I can’t think of a better example of sophisticated Neapolitan picaresque.”
I remember that afternoon and the following morning as a single, lengthy stroll, interrupted only by a café stop to search the books in my backpack for new information to investigate for real or to go into bookshops to hunt out some unknown text on sirens, Vesuvius, Leopardi, Malaparte, the dogs of Capri or Naples (my hotel was only a relative parenthesis, because I kept walking in my dreams). Although I walked alone, I never stopped mentally conversing with my guide, whose scratchy, vibrant voice is always associated in my memory with the city’s voice, or at least with its soundtrack.
“I found no trace of Leopardi in his extravagant tomb,” I told Raimondo the following day, when we were eating rice and beans in another restaurant near his bookshop. “Though I did find one in the house where he died, after climbing up one of the sloping streets in the Quartiere Montecalvario,” I continued: “on Via Nuova Santa Maria Ogni Bene.” I showed him the photo of the plaque on my cellphone: Giacomo Leopardi stayed in the two rooms in this building between December 1833 and May 1835.
And I told him it was an elegant entrance, with a large iron grille under a beautiful street lamp, but that the building was frightening, because ancient stone coexisted with cracked concrete additions, classical architecture with plastic guttering, washing hung out to dry, and a six- or seven-year-old girl who laughed every time her mother hit her with her clenched fist.
Hoping the southern air would cure him of his pulmonary edema, Leopardi lived in various apartments in Naples between October 1833 and June 1837. Piero Citati’s biography describes his life during those years as spent in café conversations, second-hand bookshops, and the Neapolitan worship of coffee and the fruits of the sea: “it was a new pleasure he hadn’t enjoyed in Bologna, Pisa, or Florence; walking and losing himself in the crowd, like anyone else, transformed into a body, a colour, a song, a sea-urchin.”
Leopardi had a humpback. Children approached him wanting to touch it, half scared, half amused, hoping to knock off a piece of luck. “You’ve yet to tell me about why you were so lucky with your first bookshop,” I told Raimondo. “That’s true, let me invite you for an espresso and I’ll tell you,” he replied. By the bar counter he recalled an old man who’d spend several minutes every day looking in amazement at the window of the newly opened Dante & Descartes.
The young bookseller soon realized he wasn’t looking at the books, but at something else, the walls perhaps, or the floor or ceiling, as if he were scouring the space now occupied by titles by Italo Calvino or Natalia Ginzburg or Benedetto Croce or Dante Alighieri. What on earth was he looking at all that time? One day he decided to invite him for a coffee, and the gentleman confessed that, in 1945, the building had housed a brothel: “He told me that many girls from Venice, Milan, or Sicily offered their charms in that place and… well, he remembered in particular a young woman from Bologna, who I imagine had made a strong impression on him.”
Soldiers’ blankets partitioned off the different “rooms.” Raimondo asked him what he remembered of the nearby stairs from Santa Barbara to Il Pendino, and the old man said he remembered the women who offered their services leaning against the walls; these prostitutes weren’t dwarves, though there was a ground floor with little women. Before he said goodbye, he said that everything the old man had told him had brought him “good luck,” because in Naples people believe prostitutes bring luck.
We hugged and said our farewells in Gesú Nuovo square, where his son Giancarlo had opened a branch of Dante & Descartes. On the ferry to Capri the next morning, I started to read the book Raimondo had retrieved for me from their authors’ homes: Curzio Malaparte.“Casa como me,” Punta del Massullo, tel. 160, Capri (“Curzio Malaparte: ‘Casa come me,’ Massullo Point, tel. 160, Capri”) by Sergio Attanasio. And Neruda a Capri. Sogno di un’isola (“Neruda in Capri: Dream of an Island”) by Teresa Cirillo.
My eyes lurched from pages to waves and I thought that I too would be lucky and would write an account of that journey, that paradox, because a journey is always movement that writing interrupts, because travelling is always movement, and a chronicle also aspires to movement, but rarely succeeds.
III The Sea in Miniature
Before Malaparte’s dogs, goats were the island’s emblematic animal: clowning, climbing mammals, perfect for those escarpments. Could the first sailors have mistaken distant goats for sirens? Couldn’t their bleating have been strangely seductive, songs deliriously distorted by the wind?
In “Among the Ruins,” his chronicle of Capri, the narcissistic British travel writer and fabulist Bruce Chatwin recalls that, “on the island of goats,” “three narcissists” built houses on respective cliffs: Axel Munthe, Baron Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, and Curzio Malaparte. As he revisits their landscapes in that brilliant chronicle (which can be read as a self-portrait in a concave mirror, given his interest in extraordinary, overflowing egos), Chatwin mentions Malaparte’s book Woman Like Me (1940), “a series of autobiographical fantasies with titles like ‘A woman like me’ or ‘A dog like me.’” There’s no doubt that the selfie house was also a trans fantasy, but with a vocation as last testament or sarcophagus. It wasn’t for nothing that he wrote about Mussolini: “Muss, a great beloved imbecile, a corpse like me.”
I’m moving away from Casa come me, but the cliffs and pine trees are still at my side on the amphibious Via Tragara, which plunges, now and then, but never loses its urbane elegance, sweeping, as it does, past the most expensive private residences in this global destination for posh tourism. After leaving behind the ancient port of Tragara—a small beach with parasols and loungers—protected by those huge, eroded buttresses resembling ancient, comatose goddesses the map identifies as Faraglioni, I reach another of Capri’s iconic buildings: the Punta Tragara Hotel. Since 1973, it has offered privileged views, which one can enjoy with a martini in one hand and an oyster in the other, from its terraces and swimming pools. Half a century earlier, however, it was a private villa that, in The Skin’s era, lodged generals Dwight Eisenhower and Mark Clark and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Three hundred metres further on, almost back in the town I left three hours ago, I stop by number 14 to spy on the ever-so-discreet Casetta di Arturo, where Pablo Neruda spent a few months. No plaque recalls this on the façade, so tourists don’t visit, but a travel writer knows it is his duty to see what others don’t, and when there’s no response from the intercom, I climb up like a mountain goat and take a look.
I survey the steps that go down the side of the ravine and, in the shade of a huge holm oak, to the patio and house that Edwin Cerio, patriarch of the island’s most powerful family, loaned to his new partner, poet Matilde Urrutia. That invitation was like manna from heaven. It was 1952, and, as a result of pressure from the Chilean dictatorship, the Italian interior minister had ordered Neruda to be expelled immediately. A group of intellectuals interceded, however, and the order was immediately revoked. Then: a telegram arrived with an invitation for Neruda to come to spend the winter and spring in Capri. Rather than go with his wife, Delia del Carril, though, Neruda took his lover; the person once called his muse. It is thanks to her that he wrote some memorable lines in Grapes and the Wind and The Captain’s Verses (“then in your depths and my depths / we discovered we were blind / within a well that burned with our shadows”); thanks to her, too, that he published others that are cringeworthy (“and the statue on the prow sails in the ocean of honey / naked, in the thrall of the throbbing male cyclone”).
Neruda lived a humble life in Capri in a humble, uncharacteristic house: a life of olives and wine and elemental odes. Although Malaparte and he were politically and artistically opposed, I realize now that the interior of Malaparte’s house, as seen in the photos and sequences of The Skin and Contempt, are very similar to the interiors of Neruda’s houses that also looked out onto the sea: the one in Valparaíso, and above all the one on Isla Negra. A travel chronicle tends to towards Aristotelian unity (of action, space, and time) so I won’t begin a long digression on the trip that led me from Neruda’s large house in Santiago de Chile to his three houses, to the three museums of this eccentric collector, to three types of poetic architecture. But I can perfectly imagine the three of them, for example, on Capri’s Massullo Point.
I continued my stroll around Capri after spying on the house Neruda lived in adulterously: I read and wrote in a restaurant near Yourcenar’s house; I visited the Ignazio Cerio Goat Centre (I remember the goat skeletons most of all); I returned to Naples and then returned home. And I continued to read Malaparte and about Malaparte, his dogs on Capri, and the dogs of Capri. And I watched films and surfed the net: one never knows when a chronicle begins or ends.
Malaparte writes in his Diary of a Foreigner in Paris that as a child he was weak, sickly, and driven by his imagination. The family home was on Via Magnolfi in Prato, the town where he was raised: “At the age of two, I removed a brick from my bedroom floor and when I saw there was sand beneath, I thought that sand was the sea. I spent hours with my ear stuck to that sand, listening to the sea, the voice of the sea.” His father gave him a conch shell and he constructed his own sea in his childhood bedroom from his strange toys. He spent his time imagining islands and, when he paused to think, he saw himself as a volcano surrounded by deserts.
Contempt—cinema about cinema: a mise en abîme. On a secondary level, the film is about Fritz Lang—who plays himself—shooting an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey for Cinecittà studios on the island of Capri: amid shots of Greek statues, the tragedies of Penelope and Ulysses are embodied by the characters of Brigitte Bardot, alternately fair or dark depending on the scene, and her husband played by Michel Piccoli, a dramaturg commissioned to rewrite the screenplay, which doesn’t meet the expectations of the arrogant American financing the film. In this fiction, Villa Malaparte is the mansion that welcomes all that arrogance. And in the fiction within the fiction, in the filming that takes place on the terrace, film and love are delivered in a holocaust to the ancient gods, the house’s technicolour stairs leading to a large altar that extends into the blue horizon.
Alberto Moravia, who worked for Malaparte before the war on La Stampa with his wife Elsa Morante, divorced her when he was writing Contempt. When Godard was preparing the film adaptation of the novel, he suffered an emotional crisis that led him to divorce the actress Anna Karina, and an ideological crisis that made him a Maoist. These are the same years when Malaparte’s last will and testament are filed—he died in 1957—and in which he left his house to the People’s Republic of China, because, after fascism and before his death, he had somehow found the time to idealize Stalin and Mao Zedong, and to ask Pope Pius XII to visit him in his bed during the one hundred and twenty days of his dying agony. While in hospital he received a message from the mayor of Capri: the island was making its peace with him, although he would have preferred his dogs to sign off on the farewell.
Several weeks after returning home, I finish Malaparte: Vita e leggende (Malaparte: His Life and Legend), the exhaustive biography by Maurizio Serra. He says in the epilogue that when he visited the villa in June 2010, he met a little dog, Luna, “still cowering because of the bad way she had been treated before she’d arrived, and she receives our caresses warily, preferring to sniff around a grassy area where Malaparte had created a cemetery for his dogs.” He also mentions Alessia and Niccolò Rositani Suckert, who manage the house. I search for their email addresses on the web, their profiles on Facebook, but in vain. Who else does Serra mention? A pianist; a Finn; a Mexican woman. I look for her on Messenger. I find her. She is Professor Maya Segarra Lagunes. I contact her. She replies.
She prefers not to give an opinion on the house. I tell her I don’t want opinions, but facts. Two days later she gives me her email address and says she and the owner of the house, Alessia Rositani, will answer my questions by email. They took a month to reply, but it was worth the wait.
“From the very first, I deeply respected and admired the house, but at the same time I was consistently intrigued and wanted to get to know it and understand its every detail and every solution they found,” writes Segarra Lagunes. “The aim, in the future, is to keep probing its secrets in order to understand completely every one of the fascinating, original architectural solutions that even today surprise architects all over the world.”
And then I do a lengthy interview with Alessia Rositani Suckert, who, together with her husband (the great-grandson of Malaparte, and son of Lucia Ronchi), administers the writer’s legacy and estate, because I realize they’re the ones who know that autobiographical house best. She tells me that Malaparte was aware that Italy and China had no legal relationship when he apparently left his house to Mao’s government. “It was a gesture to encourage dialogue between the West and the East; he was always in favour of freedom of expression and opening out, the Casa come me also stands for that.”
The couple define themselves as “a traditional family with Catholic values” and work with their son Tommaso to administer Malaparte’s legacy. The villa is an essential part of that legacy: “it is very fragile and constantly mistreated by the sea, the salt, bad weather, and needs constant attention and that’s why we count on a team of exceptional people who see to its upkeep, who are all daughters or granddaughters of Curzio’s employees, like the son of his upholsterer.” They have never received any money from the state for repair work: “We are young and can work to cover our costs, the state’s money should go to hospitals and those in need.”
Although it’s a private residence, and they live in Florence, Alessia and Niccolò regularly lodge writers, translators, and architects there. Caretakers and the dogs are the only ones in permanent residence. I tell them how I walked around the villa on June 9, imitating a sequence from the Godard film. And that I saw people in the distance. And a small dog: “It was probably my son, or perhaps our Dutch translator, Jan Van der Haar, with Stephanie La Porte, who were working in the house. And the dog could be a black Great Dane, Agata, or our dear Febo, a golden retriever, or Luna, our poor foundling, whom we often send off on an expedition to hunt the gulls that ruin our roof.”
I ask if Malaparte and Neruda met on Capri: “I don’t know, I’ll have a look in the archive.” I spend an hour and a half waiting and walking along the Via Tragara, via Google maps, looking for my digital ghost, flying over the Casa come me, looking for the change in perspective that will allow me to end this chronicle.
“I’ve checked from 1948 to 1955 and have only found this article, which seems intriguing,” I read after reducing the island in 3D. Published in Chile’s La Nación on September 25, 1953, the text provides an account of the day Malaparte visited Neruda in his house in Santiago. The author describes it in detail and concludes: “It is a magical climate: each item of furniture has the value of an idol or fetish.”
Their conversation, in French, begins in the doorway, continues in the lounge and the library, and ends in the garden. The Italian writer is fascinated by the colony of conch shells that inhabit the library: “Nothing gives an idea of the sea like a conch shell, of the sea as architecture, as geography, as country,” he writes, also relating how Neruda addresses each shell by name. One comes from Java, another from Mexico, this one from Ceylon, that one from Valparaíso: “From Capri, from Cuba, from the Atacama Desert: all the seas and all the world’s oceans are in these conch shells.”
That are miniature houses.
