Hypnotise Her

Thomas Jones

• BuyAxel Munthe: The Road to San Michele by Bengt Jangfeldt, translated by Harry Watson
  Tauris, 381 pp, £25.00, March 2008, ISBN 978 1 84511 720 7

The Casa Malaparte, where Jean-Luc Godard shot Le Mépris, was built by the formerly Fascist, soon-to-be Communist writer and journalist Curzio Malaparte in the late 1930s. It stands, or rather crouches, like a predator ready to pounce, on a promontory on the eastern side of Capri, overlooking the Gulf of Salerno. A bright red, long, low oblong, tapering at one end into a stairway up to the roof terrace and disappearing into foliage at the other, nothing but clean lines and unbroken surfaces, it’s a model of uncompromising Modernist architecture. Across the island is the Villa San Michele, in many ways the Casa Malaparte’s antithesis, a neo-classical riot of terraces, cloisters, galleries and pergolas, built around the turn of the 20th century, supposedly on the site – and from the ruins – of one of Tiberius’ 12 villas, by the Swedish doctor, writer, adventurer and pan-European celebrity Axel Munthe.