Malaparte’s fantastic folly

When Curzio Malaparte built his stunning Casa Come Me (“House Like Me”) in the early 1940s, he was the most brilliant and controversial writer in Italy. (I recently wrote about his life here.)  The house was also called Casa Matta, a madhouse or architectural folly.  In 1937 he’d bought the land from a farmer, who was delighted to sell a useless piece of rock for 8,000 lire.  He built the house at Punta Massullo, an inaccessible and barren promontory on the uninhabited southeast coastline of Capri.  His biographer Maurizio Serra writes that Malaparte “spent days with the masons building his elongated house, sharing bread, olives and onions with them, singing their songs, mourning their dead at sea, and answering to ‘Curtino’”.

His radical house was set “in the wildest, most solitary, most dramatic part of Capri.  It faced south and east, where the island turns from humane to ferocious, where nature expresses itself with an incomparable and cruel force, a promontory with extraordinarily pure lines, that hurled itself into the sea like a claw made of stone.”  The Gulf of Naples and volcanic Vesuvius lay to the north, the Sorrentine peninsula to the east and the ancient ruins of Paestum to the south.

Construction began in the spring of 1938, two years before Italy entered the war in 1940. It exposed the workers and materials to the elements, and was not completed until September 1942.  The shortage of supplies during the war made progress slow and Malaparte became impatient.  To get there from the island’s port, the Marina Grande, visitors first took the funicular to the summit of the mountain and arrived at the Piazzetta, the center of Capri life.  They then had to walk for two hours.  Malaparte paved the original steep goat trail that led to the house with stone and bricks.  But the approach was still arduous, combining a literary pilgrimage with a via dolorosa.

The precarious descent from the cliffs far above the house, and down the treacherous winding pathway, ended in the prospect of a tough climb up 99 steep stairs to the roof and the horizon beyond.  On calm days, the house could also be reached by sea. From the tiny dock, visitors had to climb the 116 steps cut into the cliff to reach the house.  The struggle to get there was rewarded by the amazing Casa and the views open to the sea and to the sky.  During the fierce winter storms the waves crashed against the treacherous rocks, even reached the roof, and forced the inhabitants to evacuate the lower floor.

Interior Of Villa Malaparte

The house began with the cooperation of an exceptional writer and a leading modernist architect, Adalberto Libera.  But his design was radically modified by Malaparte, and Libera’s original plan eventually disappeared.  Like the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who designed every detail in his sister’s luxurious mansion in Vienna, Malaparte paid strict attention to every aspect of his house.  He dug a cistern into the rocks to collect rain water and built a tiny patio to sunbathe after swimming.

Roof Terrace with Freestanding Curving Wall

The rectangular two-story Casa, 95 feet long and only 22 feet wide, is extraordinary and complex.  The ground floor has four small, cell-like guest rooms, a service room and a kitchen.  When Malaparte sometimes ran out of money, he could offer his guests only salad from the garden and squid caught that morning.  The upper floor has a vast 50-by-26-feet salon, with commanding views of the surrounding cliffs through two giant picture windows that face across the narrow room.  The salon has a Raoul Dufy painting, a soft white three-cushion couch, a large polished wooden table with curved edges, and a low bench set on thick pillars in front of a monumental fireplace.  Its rear wall is made of thick but transparent glass, and when the fire is lit the waves of the sea seem to dance in the flames.  A door in the salon leads to Malaparte’s sleeping room, with a double bed and bathroom.  His current Favorita slept across the hall, next to a sunken bath, in her own bed.

Another door leads from Malaparte’s bedroom to his secluded study, which has a large window, a simple desk and chair, and a huge, rather incongruous Tyrolean tiled stove in the far corner.  He had some Abyssinian masks and vases, and small bookcases that included James Joyce’s Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.  Stairs in the salon lead up to the flat pink-tiled roof terrace, sliced by a tall concrete windscreen and curved like a white sail.  To avoid water leaks in the holes, there are no railings on the dangerous terrace.  Though a misstep could be fatal, Malaparte rode a bicycle around the big roof.

Clinging to the rugged cliff 32 meters above the sea, the Casa had walls stained the colour of dried blood.  An expert wrote, “totally enclosed on all sides, naked and shorn of ornamentation, the architecture makes no concessions to either Mediterranean naturalism or vernacular patterns.”  The red stucco box seems to grow right out of the rock, like “a flaming red brick pyramid, a grandiose Roman mausoleum eternally welded to the cliff’s ferrous base.”  Like the prow of a ship aimed at the open water or marooned on a mountain, it was isolated like a monastery, far away and hard to reach.  The staircase of the church on Lipari off the coast of Sicily, where Malaparte had been exiled and confined in 1933, was the formal model for the Casa’s idiosyncratic, trapezoidal, 32-step wide staircase, which leads to the roof terrace and looks like the entrance to a Mayan temple.

Malaparte called his Casa Come Me “a house like me, but which me?”  How did his Casa, an exclusive fortress dedicated to discomfort, reflect his courage and character, his suffering and his past?  It was magnificent, individualistic and cut a bella figura.  He built the Casa, a “self-portrait in stone,” to be the image of himself, the memory of his personality, his own architectural monument.  The house expressed the austerity and brutality of his fascist background; the setting resembled the spectacular scenery of Lipari, another Mediterranean island; the isolation and solitude recalled the prison in Rome, where he’d served harsh solitary confinement in the late 1930s.  He could now retreat to his self-imposed cage and write in peace.

In 1943 he observed, “Today I live on an island, in a harsh, melancholy and severe house which I have built alone, lonesome on a cliff hanging over the sea: a house which is the ghost, the secret image of a jail.  The image of my nostalgia.”  According to Malaparte, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (who may never have visited the Casa) once asked if he’d built the house himself.  Malaparte, gesturing at the cliff, sea and sky, said “No, I didn’t, but I made the scenery.”

Malaparte died in 1957 and left the Casa to China to strengthen East-West relations.  His family challenged his legacy, sued the Chinese government and won control of his Casa.  During the protracted lawsuit, the house remained locked up for two decades.  The building suffered years of neglect and vandalism, and was badly damaged by salt and water.  Its facades had decomposed from the inside out, and by the 1960s it  was in a ruined state.   Michael McDonough declared that the Casa’s “design was a triumph; its construction an affliction.”

Curzio Malaparte

In 1972 Malaparte’s family donated the Casa to the Giorgio Ronchi Foundation, which renovated the house.  During construction the terrace was not strong enough to support a helicopter, which rarely and perilously lowered materials from the air, so the workers and most of the material had to be brought in by sea.  In November 1992 a gigantic wave crashed against the rocks, submerged the entire building and accelerated its state of degradation.  Today the Casa—though far from Capri town and still buffeted by the wind and the sea—is used for cultural events and for the serious study of Malaparte’s work and house.

The last part of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, was filmed on Casa Come Me.  The facade is peeling, the bricks are falling out of the staircase and the high jagged rocks are dangerously close to the house.  The first shot takes place on a rocking boat.  The plot deals with the conflict between a European director (Fritz Lang playing himself) and a crude Hollywood producer (Jack Palance) over a remake of the Odyssey.  Palance hires Michel Piccoli to rewrite Lang’s script.  As Piccoli—a dramatist and thriller writer— sells out to Hollywood, his wife (Brigitte Bardot) despises him and he’s complicit in her seduction.  The Casa becomes a house of betrayal and, Philip Lopate notes, “Bardot sunbathes on the roof like a vestal virgin about to be sacrificed on the altar of a brutal god.”  Bardot’s marriage breaks up, she leaves Piccoli for Palance and the lovers both die in a car crash en route to Rome.  The Casa setting inspired, as Malaparte may have intended, a drama of quarrels and anger, infidelity and death.

Contempt (1963)
Brigitte Bardot, Fritz Lang, Jack Palance, Giorgia Moll, and Michel Piccoli

For this essay I have used two excellent books: Marida Talamona, Casa Malaparte  (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), and Malaparte: A House Like Me, edited by Michael McDonough (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999), which includes drawings and essays by many prominent architects and artists.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real.

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