Tre narcissist built villas on cliff edges in Capri as monuments to their egotism.All were writers, all were fantasists, and a whiff of scandal was attached to each. They were Baron Fersen, Axel Munthe and Curzio Malaparte.
Jacques Fersen inherited a steel mill in Luxembourg. He got into trouble early with the French authorities with the publication of hi Hymn to Adonis, compounded with his arrest by the Paris police for the corruption of schoolboys. These events led him to fly to Capri.
Capri means isle of goats and the traditions of the goat-footed god Pan have never died out on the island. Dreaming of fouture orgies, Fersen put in motion plans to build his villa Lysis immediately below the villa of another reputed pervert, the villa Jovis which belonged to Tiberius. While his villa was under construction, Fersen travelled to Ceylon, where he picked up an opium habit and on his way back to the finished villa a Roman newspaper boy callled Nino Cesarini. The newspaper he installed on Capri with himself. Scandal mounted until after a mock human sacrifice with Nino as the victim in the grotto of Mithras, the Capriotes threw them out. During the First World War Nino, opium detoxified, fought in the Apennines while Fersen luxurieted in the South of France.
The war over and their outrageous behaviour in the past, they returned to Capri. Fersen was already doomed and one night in November 1923, dressed in robes of rose coloured silk, he deliberately took a huge overdose of opium and died. The villa is ruined. But above the peristyle you can still read the lettering inscribed in black marble: Amori et Dolori Sacrum.
Axel Munthe, a Swedish doctor and psychiatrist, was the most lecherous of the three. As a student doctor in Paris he travelled to Naples to help with the terrible cholera of 1884, fell in love with a small house on Anacapri owned by a workman on the site of one of Tiberius' twelve villas and bought it. To pay for the villa of San Michele which he built with his bare hand, he set up a medical practise in Rome. Abandoning his treattment of the poor, he started to work for the very rich, most of whose illnesses were neurological.
The house developed without a plan in a mock-Renaissance style. Munthe became obsessed by Tiberius. Tiberius owned twelve properties on the island; so eventually did Munthe. Tiberius collected statues; Munthe did too. The statuary is most fake but he liked to hint that some of them were the originals.
San Michele became a sanatorium for ailing monarchs, the Queen of Sweden, the Czarina of Russia and the Empress os Austria.
His book The story of San Michele is a collection of whimsical short pieces in the in the same vein as his earlier Memories and Vagaries and his first book Letters from a Mourning City about his experiences as a young doctor in Naples during the cholera plague.
Unlike the two earlier volumes, The Story of San Michele became a bestseller in twenty-five languages for most of Munthe's long lifetime. The book is a self-congratulatory. Like the provenance of the stautues, the stories sound made up.
Despite what he says in his book about the warmth of his reception whenever he returned home, he was not liked on Capri. The Capriotes nicknamed him the billy-goat, not just for the number of his illegitimate childrn on the islan, easily identifiable for their horse faces and red hair, but also for his smell. Munthe died aged ninety-two, living in the Royal Palace of Sweden. Keen to be remembered fo San Michele and its sensational garden, he left the villa, the garden and mount Barbarossa to the Swedish State.
Curzio Malaparte, the last of these three narcissists, was famous as a two-faced charmer with a liking for being difficult. His villa, named a house like me, is perched awkwardly on an inaccessible headland jutting out to sea and it has no garden. The walls are the colour of blood, the windows circular like an ocean liner's. The saloon is white and bare like a monastery, while the "room of the favourite" is complete with a monumental grey marble bathroom. In fact Malaparte seems to have regarded sex as something liturgical. The study has floor tiles of painted lyres and in this room he wrote his two most famous books, Kaputt and The Skin.
But this arch Italian was in fact half German, baptised Kurt Suckert.
After the First World War he became a journalist and a Fascist. He fancied himself a man of action like Napoleon, but in fact was a literary voyeur.
Having read a pamphlet on Napoleon, entitled I Malaparte ed I Bonaparte, he changed his name. Everything about him was a fake. His origins were irredeemaably middle class, but he hobnobbed only with princes and peasants. He hated homsexuals but reputedly went to bet with men and women. He was a Fascist who jeered at Il duce. And he was astute enough to realize that Germans would lose the Second World War and Fascism was absurd.
In 1931 he wrote a brilliant book called The Technique of the Coup d'Etat. In the last chapter of this book, which has the eye-catching title, Hitler, a woman, he wrote: «This fat and boastful Austrian could well have, like all Austrians, a certain taste for the heroes of Ancient Rome, his hero Julius Cesar in lederhosen. The spirit of Hitler is profoundly feminine.
His intelligence, his ambitions, even his willpower, have nothing virile about them. Hitler, the dictator, the woman whom Germany deserves». This did not endear him to the Fuhrer.
On Mussolini's orders he was arrested, beaten up and sentenced to five years exile on the island of Lipari.
After the publication of The Skin, the Capriotes and Neapolitans felt do betrayed by someone who had been a collaborator that he was hounded out of the South. He joined the Communist party and went to France, then to the Sovietic Union and finally China.
In Peking he rather suddenly developed lung cancer and died in agony. Difficult to the end. He left his Capri house to the Chinese People's Republic.
Maybe these three narcissists were right in building their villas, because today they are remenbered mainly for their villas.
