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| Curzio Malaparte |
Curzio Malaparte: Self-love among the ruins
An editor, polemicist, satirist and war correspondent, Curzio Malaparte was also a fascist who made his name and reputation in the service of Mussolini's barbaric regime. Yet there is something dazzling in his writing that retains its value, argues one writer.
Boyd Tonkin
Half Aztec temple, half Modernist living-machine, the Casa Malaparte stands alone on a rocky, sea-lashed promontory that juts out towards the mainland at the eastern edge of the island of Capri. You may recognise this house even if you have never heard of the dashing, gifted but bedevilled Italian writer who had it built according to own plans, after a quarrel with the architect he hired. In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (Contempt), the warring couple played by Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli strut and spar across the villa’s vast rooftop patio.
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Casa Malaparte
Capri,Italy |
In this Homeric spot, a monstrous movie mogul (Jack Palance) tries to produce a shambolic adaptation of the Odyssey directed by the great Fritz Lang (acted by Lang himself). The sun hammers down on this austere avant-garde hideaway; vast monumental steps rise up to the rooftop stage; the waves of the Bay of Naples surge and swell, as does Georges Delerue’s lush soundtrack. People remember the Casa Malaparte, and Bardot in her glory as queen of this eerie outpost, long after they forget the film’s plot.
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Kate Moss
Casa Malaparte
Capri, Italy |
Later ad campaigns have exploited that terrace, that flight of steps. To promote the label’s spring 2018 collection, Kate Moss recently did a shoot here for Yves Saint Laurent. The villa served as the poster image for the 2016 Cannes film festival. Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957), the attention-seeking loner and celebrity-mad maverick who constructed it in the years after 1937, would no doubt have appreciated its lasting allure for the A-list.
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Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli in Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’,
partly filmed at Casa Malaparte |
Yet, as with so much that Malaparte did and wrote, a large part of the villa’s effect arises from theatrical sleight-of-hand. His grand designs, which more than doubled the original estimate of the cost, never factored in the location and the climate. Salt winds and waves began to degrade the fabric almost as soon as Malaparte moved in. It took long years of conservation to restore his solitary palace to a stage fit for a new generation of film-stars and supermodels. Malaparte called his cherished, gale-lashed home ‘Casa come me’, a house like me. With its splendid, heroic face to the world, hiding an interior chilly, bare and prone to decay, the clifftop house on Cape Massullo arguably does hold up a mirror to its maker.
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| Brigitte Bardot on the set of director Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, 1963 (‘Le Mepris’) |
Bruce Chatwin, who saluted a sort of kindred spirit in Malaparte when he wrote about this place for Vanity Fair in 1984, summed up the villa as ‘Self-love among the ruins’. As editor, polemicist, satirist, front-line war correspondent and creator of dazzling, shocking ‘non-fiction novels’ decades before the term existed, Malaparte took the human and physical ruins of Europe in the age of Mussolini, Hitler and genocidal warfare as his principal theme. He certainly displayed plenty of self-love. Behind the façade, however, as in the bleak chambers of the villa, we may detect emptiness, self-doubt, even self-disgust. This consummate opportunist, after all, had made his name and reputation in the service of a brutal and barbaric regime.
