He maintains the cinema anecdote that the American producer Joseph E. Levine became angry when they presented him with a first cut of the film The contempt (1963), which he had financed. “Half of the budget has gone to Brigitte Bardot, and she hardly goes out naked!” Or something like that, it seems that she objected to the director, Jean-Luc Godard, who called her King Kong Levine. As a result, more scenes had to be filmed with the star, including a famous one in which, lying face down next to co-star Michel Piccoli, Bardot showed off her anatomy (“Do you see my butt in the mirror? Do you like my buttocks? And my breasts, do you like them?”) while the image turned red and blue. In its commercial debut, The contempt It was quite far from becoming the box office bomb that the producers and director expected. So the actress’s body did little for the film. In return, the film did a lot for one of its settings, the Malaparte House, which took over the entire final stretch to almost eclipse a beautiful story of heartbreak, cinema and mythology. What until then had been an architectural exquisiteness known only to a few initiates became an icon suitable for digestion by mass culture. That is, in what we know as a star.
“I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.” The words that Piccoli addressed to Bardot in the film could have been dedicated to himself by Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957), Italian journalist, writer, soldier and diplomat, as well as official author and first owner of the house in Capri that bears his name. . Or, to be more exact, his pseudonym: the son of an Italian and a German, his name was actually Curt Erich Suckert, but he renamed himself as a nod to Napoleon Bonaparte, which already offers signs of a spirit as sarcastic as it is megalomaniac. Malaparte had a strong temperament tending towards narcissism and a colorful life that included an affair with Virginia Bourbon del Monte, the widow of the son of the founder of FIAT, Giovanni Agnelli. The patriarch prevented his marriage and proceeded to fire him from the direction of the newspaper. La Stampa.
In general, Malaparte never found a place where he was, as if above all he had aspired to assert his larger-than-life personality. Adhered to fascism from a very young age, however, he maintained a somewhat tense relationship with the hierarchies of his country’s regime. One of his writings, Coup d’état technique, which he published in Paris in 1931 (it would not reach Italy until after the Second World War), was interpreted as an attack on Mussolini and Hitler, and triggered a series of disagreements that ended with a sentence to remain confined on the Aeolian island of Lipari, north of Sicily, for five years. Of which he only strictly served a few months, thanks to his excellent relationships: one of his powerful friends was Count Galeazzo Ciano, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law and minister (much later, Malaparte would assure that he had served his long sentence, a victim of fascism). ). Ciano and his wife, Edda Mussolini, owned a house on another island, Capri. Facing the Sorrento peninsula, which closes off the idyllic Gulf of Naples to the south, Capri treasured a tradition as an earthly paradise that dated back to the times of the Roman emperor Tiberius, and hosted a large community of aesthetes and vacationers on its extensive summer vacations. bon vivants.
Malaparte acquired land in a remote place in that area, to the east of the island, at the top of the Punta Massullo cliff. And he decided to build a house there that represented him (“A house like me: strict, hard, severe,” he wrote) and that was at the same time a manifesto of modern Italian architecture. Something that for the rest of us was not viable, since many modernities were not authorized by Caprio’s urban planning regulations. No major obstacle for Malaparte, who, once again, resorted to his influence to do whatever he wanted.
The architect chosen for that company was Adalberto Libera, perhaps the most canonically rationalist of Group 7, a Milanese collective that spread the premises of the Modern Architecture Movement in Italy. His design proposed clean lines, integration into nature and the use of local stone as the predominant construction material, things that initially sounded good to Malaparte. But clashes of egos soon manifested themselves, and the client ended up taking charge of the project alone, which he signed together with his master builder, Adolfo Amitrano. Construction lasted from 1938 to 1943, under the careful supervision of Malaparte, who made decisions about every detail, including furniture. The design itself changed throughout this process, largely due to the difficulties imposed by the terrain, since the very hard rock had to be excavated or the building adapted to its irregularities. You could only get there from the sea, or by walking a long way, and in both cases through ramps and stairs. In a short article from 1940 titled Ritratto in pietra, Malaparte He defined the environment as “a place certainly only suitable for free spirits.”
Malaparte hated the classical villas that abounded in Capri, with their pretentious colonnades and other historicist fanfare. The references that he seemed to use started from Villa Jovis, on Capri itself, where Tiberius celebrated his famous orgies at the beginning of the 1st century, to the work of Le Corbusier (Villa Savoye) and Frank Lloyd Wright (The House on the Fallingwater). ). The result of all this is a three-story geometric mansion with a façade painted Pompeian red that stands out on Massullo Point like a rough ruby in its bed – in few cases the expression “architectural jewel” can be used with such literal value – , although it was designed to resemble a large stranded ship. That is why the stone and cement parallelepiped, 54 meters long and 10 meters wide, develops a boat-shaped plan. The interior rooms are arranged as modest cabins, with the exception of the enormous living room on the upper floor, equipped with enormous windows with wooden slats that look like landscape picture frames. The panorama can even be seen through the fireplace, since the fireplace has its own glass opening (in his book The skinMalaparte claimed that the house itself was not his creation, but added a boutade: “I have designed the landscape”).
Along the same lines, the solarium on the terrace is reminiscent of the roof of a pleasure ship, an impression confirmed by a curved white wall conceived as protection against the wind, which acts as a sail. From up there, the superb views of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the cliffs and the coasts are presented continuously and in all their brute force, instead of confined in their frames as from the living room. The entrance to the house is a small side door, but to reach the roof it is necessary to ascend the 32 steps that form the trapezoidal exterior brick staircase, the most representative element of the building, for which Malaparte apparently was inspired by the small church of L’Annunziata that he saw daily during his exile in Lipari.
This ascension journey has been described as that of a high priest walking towards the altar where he is going to perform a sacrifice. In The contempt, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, Godard reflected the disintegration of a couple and, in one of the best scenes filmed in the house, it was precisely that love that seemed to sacrifice itself as an offering to a merciless god. Paul (Michel Piccoli) calls Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and, getting no answer, goes up the steps, and there he finds her, sunbathing naked except for a book open on her butt (the image screams “male gaze” with a impudence, not unusual at the time), and indifferent to her pleas: “Why don’t you love me anymore?” he asks, who is willing to give up everything to remain by her side. “That’s life,” she replies in a dull tone. To Godard, the novel seemed like a sentimental little book from a station kiosk, but he preserved many of its situations, its references to the mythological story of Ulysses and Penelope, its sorrowful tone and its tragic ending. And he added the Casa Malaparte as the ideal setting for a love catastrophe.
Eighteen years later, in 1981, the Italian director Liliana Cavani adapted it to film The skin, Malaparte’s book about his experiences in Naples at the end of World War II, when the city was occupied by the Allies and he was an officer in the Italian Liberation Corps. The role of Malaparte was played by Marcello Mastroianni with his usual solvency and charisma. The lurid scenes of the film reproduced those of the novel quite faithfully, which led to it being included in the Vatican’s Index of Banned Books. But there was also space for visual solace, thanks to the sequences set in the Malaparte House, where those coastal landscapes could be seen that provided a sublime contrast to the moral miseries of post-war Italy.
After a final turn of political creed that led him to Maoism, Curzio Malaparte decided to bequeath the house to the People’s Republic of China to convert it into an artists’ residence, but his heirs ensured that this provision was not implemented. A great-nephew of the writer, Niccolò Rositani, directed the expensive restoration of the house in the late 1980s, which remains in private hands and is not open to the general public, although it is rented for events and filming. Among them, a decade ago, that of an advertisement for the Uomo perfume, by Ermenegildo Zegna, where the staircase and the surrounding landscape once again took center stage. On June 10, designer Jacquemus used the same setting to host the fashion show with which he celebrated the 15th anniversary of his brand, a hypermedia event attended by international celebrities such as Dua Lipa, Gwynteh Paltrow, Laetitia Casta and Manu Rivers.
For most, Casa Malaparte can only be seen from the outside and in the distance. The tourists who come to Capri every summer and who hire the mandatory excursion that takes them by boat to the Faraglioni and the Grotta Azzurra They point to it in admiration. Alone on her cliff, integrated into the natural environment but at the same time distinguishable from it by her stubborn individuality, she has become what her creator surely dreamed for himself: a star in her class. .
