Journal

At the umpteenth promontory, the lane of the Pizzolungo curves, almost turning back on itself, and there it is, at the end: Casa Malaparte stands at the top of Capo Massullo. We feel like Ruskin catching sight of the Gothic cathedral. We go back over the walk in our minds; we record the hour and the circumstances and we will not forget them; let us put the site and the architecture into focus.
From this viewpoint, the cape looks like a depression of the coast after the mountain. The hollow is deep and the rock seems to be detached, wandering in the sea of Capri. Casa Malaparte appears as a half-pyramid with an upside-down flight of steps, driven into the soil of the natural saddle, from which extends a parallelepiped coloured a Pompeian red. The roof is flat, very flat, parallel to the expanse of water. On the roof-terrace, a low white wall, elliptic in shape and sinking downwards.
If we had come some time ago, we would have looked and thought that the building was the concrete outcome of the project that Libera drew up for Malaparte in 1938 and which was then considerably revised by the client. But now, since we were aware of the discoveries made by Marida Talamona¹, a different version sprung to mind.
At Christmas 1937, led by his friend Ambassador Rulli, the writer Curzio Malaparte (the pseudonym of Kurt Suckert), had gone right to the end of the point. Carried away by the beauty of the place and the panorama, as early as January 1938 he bought a stretch of coast, including the precipitous wall of rock cleaved by the lane leading to Matromania, as well as the totally impassable crag plunging into the sea. He had not just astonished Rulli, but had also re-sold the upper and accessible portion of the Massullo to him. He kept for himself the inaccessible promontory. He talked it over with the master builder of Capri, Adolfo Amitrano. Encouraged, he had decided to accept the challenge of the site and build a house on it. Rulli followed his example, on his own part of the property.
At the suggestion of Orfeo Tamburi, art director of Malaparte’s magazine Prospettive, he gave the task of drawing up the plans to Adalberto Libera, who commended himself in any case as a cultivated and outstanding professional (as much and more so than his young colleagues of rationalist bent). The Amitrano firm was to be responsible for the construction.
From February to March, Libera weighed up the situation and studied the proposal in order to find out what was needed. The design for the building was at the scale 1: 100, and the form envisaged was a simple volume, a pure, conventional prism, typical of rationalist design, but with a parallelepipedal portion cut out of it towards the ground to make room for the terrace. The plans and patterns of distribution derived from this: in linear succession on the upper floor, the terrace and sitting – room; on the ground floor the bedrooms laid out in the pattern of a comb and, deflected by +0.50 m, the kitchen. The architectural characteristics are simple: roof made up of repeated small vaults, regularly subdivided fronts, socle of rusticated ashlars.
The project is essentially similar in quality to his contemporaneous one for the Reception and Conference Building at the E42 (especially with regard to the relationship of the raised block to the terraces laid out in mirror fashion). Capable of standing as the founder of the whole family of his works, in which a linear typological form is insisted on. In short the beginning of one of Libera’s many itineraria perfectionis. He sent the plans to the Commune first; then, in view of the fact that the island was about to be made subject to a ministerial landscaping plan and the Massullo had been classified as land that could not be built on, to the Ministry of National Education I Government Office of Naples.
On 24 April Libera was asked by Malaparte to send “the copy of the plan” to Amitrano on Capri, as he needed it to begin work². Perhaps Libera was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to get the plan, or let us say the executive version, ready, for he did not do as his client asked. More likely, he set to work and sent the final version after a tolerable delay³.
Yet we would not be guilty of over-emphasizing psychological factors to say that, whatever the case, Malaparte’s reaction was the same. While he continued to pull strings with the Minister Bottai and his officials to get the plans approved – and was successful: the Naples office granted permission, as an exception to the landscaping plan, and consequently the Commune gave the go-ahead to build – he was disappointed and showed signs of his discontent, proposing that the architect should give up the project. Construction work began around the middle of the year. In the meantime Malaparte cut out the figure of Libera, dismissing the idea of his efforts from his mind. Nor would it be far off the mark to say that, if he went for an on-the-spot inspection, Amitrano received him coldly.
I would guess that what Malaparte, an untiring seeker after the identity of creator, had in mind was to take the part of Eupalinos, a Greek architect who actually lived during the 6th century B.C., but who had been re-invented by Valèry in the philosophical dialogue of the same name, attributing to him rationality and irrationality, artistic thought, logic and the knowledge of a craftsman⁴. It was Valèry’s Eupalinos, an Orphic figure, a reinterpretation of the role of the mythical Orpheus who, by playing his lyre, was able to soothe men, tame wild beasts, bow down trees and carry away stones. That is to say, by means of poetry, bring order to the disorder of nature, give form to the formless, architecture to matter.
This is why the dismissal must not have been an end in itself, but was intended to create the room for him to realize his desire. Malaparte would have been one of those architects who, on the basis of an Orphism more or less rich in esoteric elements and, on the lines of a lyrical sentiment, redesign nature, reorganize reality and, afterwards, resort to imitation in order to produce the work. At the least, he would have boasted of being the architect sui generis of the sui generis Malaparte house, depending on what his typical canon of creativity would have required (evaluated without aesthetic categories, but negatively, with moral categories).
It suffices to read a couple of pages from his autobiographical novel La pelle⁵. Malaparte pretends to have received a visit from Marshal Rommel on Capri in the spring of 1942. Rommel and Malaparte walked round the villa talking. They stopped “in the immense hall with its great windows looking out onto the most beautiful scenery in the world.” Rommel was about to take his leave, but hesitated. After a moment of silence, he asked his host whether he had acquired the house already built or whether he had designed and built it himself. His host replied that yes, the house already existed (and this was not true), but that he had “designed the scenery.” And traced a half-circle in the air, from the rocks in the sea to the vertiginous wall of Matromania. The map showed the route all along the bay of the Massullo and, at the junction, a winding line of descent to the villa, 25 metres above sea level. We folded the map and set off. As we descended, something Malaparte had written came to mind, a report, a report on the Massullo house of the kind that architects attach to their projects⁶.
Malaparte begins by stating that he had set himself a very high objective: an architectural portrait of himself and of his personality. Reckoning himself to be a hard, strange and plain man, free of ornaments, his home would have to be hard, strange and very modern. But the man was also memory of his existence, for instance of the period of his confinement on Lipari, and the architecture would bear the mark of this. He continues by referring to the procedure, which was suitable for and worthy of an ancient ritual. His exploration of the rock hand over hand, in order to read there the horoscope of the architecture. His belief that the architecture would be a Mediterranean unicum, like the isolated temples sheer above the Aegean in Attica, while it would have no relationship with the local surroundings, the picturesque buildings of Capri, Anacapri, Marina Piccola and Marina Grande (which even in those days were vaunted to be a masterpiece of style). His close collaboration with the master builder, craftsman and oracle, in opposition to the architects and engineers, good only for “the legal questions.” His view of the construction site as a genuine project. His steady application to the work. His love of building…
Malaparte refers to having oriented the building so that the corners cut the cardinal points and the directions of the prevailing winds, the greco (north-east) and the scirocco (south-east). To having taken the volumetric form of the architecture from the shape of the Massullo, the half-pyramid from the depression, the parallelepiped from the hint of a plateau at the end (and, of course, neglects to mention the decisive part played by Libera’s design).
He says that he wanted to use stone quarried on the site as a construction material (and does not refer to the concrete, the iron reinforcing rods, the cement and the bricks that were carried there by boat).
We reached the fork, where stands a terracotta tablet bearing the inscription “Fondazione Giorgio Ronchi” (in place of the original “Casa come me” – “House like me”). We started down the path, interspersed with short flights of steps. Often we tore our eyes away from the charms of the scenery to look at the layout of the path. Not because of some aesthetic perversion, but because it helped us to reflect. What were we thinking? That they built the path in 1938 or 1939, during the construction of the villa; it provided a link between the house and the town of Capri above.
Once the designer of the house had become its inhabitant, and found himself afflicted with the desire to play a leading part, he devised an extraordinary cure: he stayed down there to play the part of flight, withdrawal, solitude, meditation and all the rest. And it was the surest way to attract people, to draw the powerful, the intellectuals of Europe, along with their telephone calls⁷. As well as the best omen that the gaze of the mass media would one day turn his way.
We went through the gate. But we still had to go farther down and, a little lower, our feet touched the platform paved with terracotta tiles. And, just like when they touch the bottom of a swimming-pool, we were pushed back up, to climb the triangular flight of steps in front. It looks like a stylized bucranium and represents the most synthetic and familiar image of the house.
The climb should have been easy. Instead it was difficult. The flight of steps is fairly steep and long: it is made up of thirty-three steps and has no landing on which to take a rest. Moreover one gets the disagreeable impression that the goal is receding, rather than drawing nearer; this is the fault of the inverted splay, similar to that of the Annunziata on Lipari⁸.
The climb is something of an initiation. Once on the terrace, we found ourselves in a superhuman situation and felt that we had been admitted to a sacred ritual. Today as yesterday, the scene is not limited to the grand solarium, but spills over into the sky, the sea, in every direction. The leading actor is the sun, and it plays its part. The heavenly body performs until the middle of the afternoon, when it sets behind Tragara. An irresistible, incontrovertible performer, it is not even resisted by an inanimate character like the petrified sail, or by animate ones such as the writer himself, when he used to put on his displays of cycling.
We went on in a straight line and reached the edge of the track. There is no parapet and the only feats possible are the about turn and the suicide jump.
To turn round and make our way back meant becoming men again, architects in fact, capable of tackling and deciphering architectural matters. From the solarium without tubular railings (which would have given it a rationalistic air) to the column without a capital (sole concession to the stylistic characteristics of Capri), to the elliptical wall declining to embrace the chimney and to the triangular flight of steps taking on the appearance of an auditorium, facing the scene in front, the steep precipice (although dotted with pines, holm oaks and bushes).
It looked to us, this sequence, like the fruit of an Orphic, lyrical, modulated composition in a peculiar metre, the kind to be found in some of the splendid ruins to which the classic works of Mediterranean architecture have been reduced⁹. In a photograph taken from land, that can be dated to the spring of 1939, the carcasse of the architecture is already finished and the house is beginning to resemble a ship stranded on the rocks. One notes the presence of a vomitory in the upper zone of the auditorium. In reality, it was the passage used by the builders to carry their materials back and forth.
Every time that Malaparte visited the site, he stopped to consider that opening. It pleased him. He regarded it as the concrete means by which the natural landscape was made continuous with the interior of the house. And he decided to make it the axial entrance. But then Amitrano, always practical and scornful of aesthetic and typological motives, observed that during the winter rains the water would find it all too convenient a passage and run into the rooms on the upper floor. It would be better to finish the construction work, bring in the big pieces of furniture, even heavier than the stones, and dose it¹⁰. Malaparte allowed himself to be persuaded and, when the moment was right, ordered it to be sealed.
By this time, if we weighed up our visit to the Orphic work of architecture, we had got everything, except for its heart, the interior. Nor did we know how to get in.
As for the entrance, that is located on the south-west facade, together with a number of other holes, cleanly cut through the plastered wall (like in the Tuscan farmhouses dear to Malaparte, who was born in Prato, and visited by rationalist architects more for the purposes of inspiration than for those of study. We opened the door with its single pane of glass and found ourselves in the vestibule: left-over space, and yet the node of every internal route. Going to the breakfast room already meant a first short journey. We entered and took a look round: it is a little folly in which the wood panelling and furniture, the bench, plank-bed and stove covered with majolica tiles, induce one to compare the panorama on the other side of the glass, Matromania, with one from the Dolomites. One possibility was to follow a corridor or spine of distribution for the guests’ bedrooms. We did so and realized that it formed the hospice (Malaparte’s name for it), a separate typological system, as are the guest-quarters on the ground floor provided for in Libera’s plans, or the hostel of the villas of Augustus and Tiberius perched on the peaks of the island of Capri, excavated by archaeologists in a mixture of enthusiasm and terror. Another opportunity was to explore the space beneath the flight of steps. We took it and arrived in the kitchen where the reinforced concrete framework of the pilasters and slanting girders is visible. From here one descends into the bowels of the house, into cells in direct contact with the saddle between the precipice and the promontory.
Returning to the vestibule, we climbed a short flight of steps to the upper floor. We passed through the balcony which, if it were not responsible for cancelling out the mark of the axial entrance cherished by Malaparte, would be irrelevant. And we came into the sitting-room, located inside the parallelepipedal volume of the house.
Set at the four corners are the same number of horizontal windows, in the shape of rectangles set on their sides. The fireplace stands between two openings to the south-west. The surviving pieces of furniture stand on a floor of ash grey stones laid in opus incertum. Although the sunlit outside world seeks continuation, shafts of light break in and the furnishings vibrate with a peculiar Kunstwollen, the sitting-room now resembles its former owner: dead, corrupted, dusty and fading. We wandered here and there, almost hoping to run across the ghost of Malaparte treading the boards of what had been his favourite stage. We found nothing. On impulse we moved to survey the view from the large windows. To the first, Matromania appeared amidst the pines now grown tall; to the second, in the distance, Punta Campanella; to the third, the rocks in the sea; to the fourth, the crag of the Monacone. To no-one, the shade of Malaparte.
In 1938-39, the man of letters was inclined to go beyond the lyrical revision, long underway, of the field of poetry, polluted by private moods and corroded by the acids of collective history. He was aiming, the man of letters, at a poetry that would recreate the already created, re-invent the already invented and, by acting on reality as given, reveal surreality. “For the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, poetry substitutes its poetic laws. The only ones that count. There are no actions, thoughts, objects, feelings, whether poetic or not. Only that which is in poetry exists. What belongs to the world of poetry. Outside this, nothing exists. There are relationships of identity, between objects, ideas, feelings, actions, above the physical plane itself: and some have tried to explain this identity with dream”¹¹. In short he seemed to follow the line of his beloved Éluard, of Breton and company, even though, in theoretical terms, he proclaimed French surrealism to be more limited than metaphysical art, magismo and novecentismo, less effective than typically Italian artistic currents¹². Malaparte was committed to the attempt to make his poetics concrete: both in the layout of the interiors of his home and, inside the finished house, in the writing of stories and novels¹³.
As an architect, or rather a designer, he applied himself to the furniture, especially the furniture intended for the sitting-room. He designed and set about making armchairs, as hypertrophied as the armchairs depicted by de Chirico, and couches, as elegant, exhausted and limp as the couches painted by Savinio. A table with a sinuous block as its top and cone-shaped legs, a crazy object verging on the paroxysm of Dalì. A bench with a serpentine seat and supported by columns that look like they come from the junk-yard rather than from an archaeological excavation. And, to the same design, hermaphrodite consoles. Nor did he neglect the fittings. The windows, for example. Moulded frames along the cuts in the wall, a sort of proscenium. Theatrical drop-curtains instead of the usual ones. Casements reduced to nothing, with three panes of glass, the middle one on a pivot. All so that the windows are transformed into unusual prosceniums. Or, to take another example, the fireplace. The cowl bears an image of the phases of the moon, waxing and waning. Jèna crystal at the back of the hearth so that, by magic, the fire would dance against the moonlit sea.
He arranged the furniture in transverse rows. In line with the proscenium-windows, the armchairs with the “luminator”, and the couches. Down the median line, the bas-relief by Fazzini, the table and the bench, to lure the faithful to their places in front of the fireplace-altar¹⁴.
Probably what resulted was not a true set of furnishings, but a vague allegory of intèrieur. This certainly fitted the sitting-room, just as the surrealistic furniture desired by Charles de Beistègui suited the rooms of the Beistègui penthouse, especially the chambre à ciel ouvert, designed eight years earlier by Le Corbusier.
On page 254 of La pelle, Malaparte calls the sitting – room an atrium. But an introduction to what? In the meantime the sitting-room extends beyond the door to the south. Finally, beyond the door, the plan conquers the axis of symmetry and acquires two transverses, taking on the aspect of a St. Andrew’ s cross. The cardinal corridor is immediately crossed by a first transverse arm, that ends in two small windows, one facing east, the other west. A little further on it encounters an entrance and its twin. A and B are adjacent and provide access to apartments that are mirror images of one another, but this mirroring prevents their integration. So that we were compelled to make separate visits.
From A we entered Curzio’s apartment. We looked around curiously. A bedroom with solid and dark furniture, a bathroom lined with marble and fitted with Ideal Standard appliances. From B we reached the apartment “of the favourite.” An almost identical bedroom; an almost identical bathroom. However the differences are not of small account: in Curzio’s bedroom the fireplace and the fine built-in wardrobe are missing, but there is a little door. As one crosses its threshold, one becomes aware of leaving behind everything that served in that place as an alternative to domestic life, and of venturing into the sacred – the place where Curzio officiated to his own supreme deity.
We had reached the last refuge. The writer’s study occupies the second transverse arm, extending the entire width of the house. The longest side coincides with the wall of the construction and frames sea and sky. The short sides are also the building’s outer walls and frame the Punta Campanella and the rocks in the sea respectively. The floor is covered with ceramic tiles, each of which bears the figure of the lyre. Shelving on the walls is laden with crumpled books, old editions from the thirties, forties and fifties. The shelves run all the way round and end at the desk. Chair with a lyre-shaped back. Armchair. Couch. Tyrolean stove. A few surviving bits of furniture.
He suggested to Savinio’s hand the motif of the lyre, taking his inspiration from the one sketched by Goethe in the margins of his Italian Journey. He was responsible for the design of the shelves and desk, which gives the impression of a fettering device, a celibate machine. He chose the pictures by Dufy, Delaunay, Pascin, Kokoschka, Chagall, Morandi and de Pisis. He took care of their hanging, resembling that of an exhibition of surrealist painting¹⁵.
Inside the microcosm¹⁶, the air carried an odour of electric lighting, resin, brilliantine and eau de cologne. With a helmet of hair black as night, a shiny face, a scarf knotted tightly round his neck, Curzio used to wear a Capri jersey, shorts and ordinary slippers (the height of eccentricity). Curzio sat and wrote. He struck an attitude of intellectual life.

Vittorio Savi

(Written in 1988, published with the same title, in the same year, by Lotus International, n° 60. Corrected, thanks to the assistance of Ramona Loffredo, in 2006, but not updated. The translation is the same as in the first publication, and differs only slightly from today’s Italian text. We would like to thank the editor of the journal, Pier Luigi Nicolin, for authorizing publication online. Vittorio Savi, svv@unife.it)

Note
1- M.I. Talamona has sought, tracked down and published the original plans by Adalberto Libera and thoroughly investigated the history of his design of Malaparte’s house: cf. “L’architetto e lo scrittore”, in Adalberto Libera, Electa, Milan 1989 (catalogue of the retrospective exhibition on Libera, Palazzo delle Albere, Trent), He has done an excellent job of work, which I have permitted myself to summarize above. Marida is also preparing to reconstruct the story of Malaparte’s design and execution. in an essay that will appear in a volume to published by the Clup of Milan. Prior to this peculiar home, the critical value of which remains unimpaired. Here is the list: G.C. Argan, Libera, Editalia, Rome 1975. pp. 12-13; F. G. Petrusch, “Casa Malaparte a Capri”, Psicon, II (1975), no. 5, pp. 140-144 (with drawings and photographs by the authors); J. Hejduk, “Casa come me” Domus, 1980, no, 605, pp. 8-13 (with photographs by G. Basilico); M. Tafuri, “L’ascesi e il gioco”, Gran Bazaar, 1981, no. 15, pp. 92-97; P, Depietri, Album di Casa Malaparte, graduate thesis, Bologna (with photographs the author).
2- The reminder sent to Libera by Malaparte on paper headed “Prospects” is preserved in Libera Archives, Rome. The text is given in Malaparte: una proposta,(catalogue of the exhibition conference of the same name, Capri 1978), De Luca, Rome 1982.
3- Libera’s probable executive plan has been lost; in any case, in spite of much inquiry, it has not come to light so far.
4- There is no reason why Malaparte, an omnivorous reader, shou]d not have been familiar with Eupalinos ou l’architecte, in the NRF edition, Paris 1921 or subsequent editions, or in the Italian translation by R. Contu, Carabba, Lanciano 1932.
5- Cf. C. Malaparte, La pelle, Aria d’Italia, Rome-Milan 1949, pp. 253-254; French ed., Denoël, Paris 19-19, pp. 305-306.
6- The typescript is in the possession of Prof. Ruffolo of Naples and has appeared in print under the editorial title “Una casa tra greco c scirocco” in il Mattino, 20.6.1987. One cannot be sure, but perhaps, as it insists on the analogy between the work and its creator, it is contemporaneous with Città come me, Donna come me, Cane come me…., the artistic prose works of the late thirties collected in Donna come me, Mondadori, Milan 1940.
7- Malaparte’s note paper of that time bore the stamped heading: Curzio Malaparte / Casa come me / telefono n.160 / Capri.
8- The writer was photographed against the background of the staircase of the church on Lipari (photograph in Malaparte: una proposta, cit.). And he declared that it had been the inspiration for the f1ight of steps in his house (cf. the account by Guglielmo Rulli in L. Sorrentino, “La Cina resta sull’uscio di villa Malaparte”, Tempo, XXVI (1964), no. 2, p. 23).
9- In the article cited Francesco Venezia interprets the house as an Orphic canto and, implicitly, takes it as a paradigm of an architectural tendency, including his own architecture “of poetry”; a tendency destined to grow in spite of hostility.
10- Words ascribed to Adolfo Amitrano by his son Ciro, who worked on the construction of the house (cf. the account in P. Depietri, op. cit.).
11- C. Malaparte, “Notizia” (1938), in L ‘arcitaliano e tutte le altre poesie, Vallecchi, Florence 1963, p. 229. “Notizia” is an important piece of poetry, so openly neo- surrealist that it could bear the signature of Éluard, Breton, etc.
12- Cf. “Il surrealismo e l’Italia”, in Corriere della Sera, 12.10.1938; expanded on in the essay of the same name in Prospettive, 1940, no. l, pp. 3-7.
13- Cf. Kaputt, Casella, Naples 1944, and La pelle, cit.. The character of these texts, completed in the house, is described by G. Grana, Malaparte, La Nuova Italia, Florence 1968 (the only critically valid monograph, apart from the contributions to the conference “Malaparte scrittore europeo”, Prato 1987, the proceedings of which have nor yet been published).
14- The original state of the sitting-room can he seen in old photographs (preserved by the Fondazione Giorgio Ronchi, the present owner of Malaparte’s house).
15- The original state of the study is documented in old photographs and in a nocturne by Malaparte, the undated incipit of Benedetti italiani, Vallecchi. Florence 1961.
16- In “Surrealism and Architecture”, A.D., 1978. nos. 2-3 (monograph), neither Dalibor Veseley nor Raymond Koolhaas, nor others include the interiors of this house in the catalogue of surrealist architecture. In the cited article by John Hejduk they are barely mentioned. This does not mean that the interiors cannot be placed at the origin of a neo-surrealistic line of architectural research now exemplified in the works of Veseley, Koolhaas and, above all, Hejduk.