'Twas on the Isle of Capri: Guide to Literary Capri

By Arne Melberg and Enel Melberg

The legends and stories about Capri started already when the emperor Tiberius settled on the island 2000 years ago in order to enjoy his old age. The stories multiplied when tourists started visiting the island in the 19th Century and the legends still flourish. Among all the visitors there have been quite a few writers for longer or shorter periods, some even settled permanently. In this book we make a personal choice among the writers that have been inspired by Capri and contributed to the stories about Capri. We have tried to make a guide to the literary history, the literary geography and all stories about this remarkable island.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Aug 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9789175694894

Arne Melberg

Arne Melberg, professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. Arne has written 20 books in literary history and literary analysis, two of them travel books in cooperation with his wife, Enel Melberg. He has written several hundreds articles.

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'Twas on the Isle of Capri

Titelsida

Table of Contents

Arrivals

The Mythical Island

Capri Walks

Anacapri Walks

In the Days of Mass Tourism

As Time Goes By

Copyright

Arne Melberg & Enel Melberg

'Twas on the Isle of Capri …

Guide to Literary Capri

Table of Contents

1. Arrivals

2. The Mythical Island 

Tiberius, Ulysses 

Capri: south of south 

Goethe and Mme de Staël 

And then Capri: August Kopisch, H. C. Andersen, Friedrich Nietzsche 

August Kopisch and the Blue Grotto 

H.C. Andersen and the Blue Grotto

Nietzsche and the Mithras-Cave

3. Capri Walks 

Hiddigeigei: Walter Benjamin, Asja Lacis

The Road to Tragara: Edwin Cerio

Rilke in the House of Roses

Captain Neruda  46

Casa Solitaria: D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Norman Douglas, Compton Mackenzie 

Casa Malaparte: Curzio Malaparte

Villa Lysis: Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen

Marina Piccola: Joseph Conrad, Maxim Gorkij, Gustaw Herling 

4. Anacapri Walks

San Michele: Axel Munthe

La Dottoressa and Graham Greene 

Mama Nord, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Mario Soldati 

5. In the Days of Mass Tourism

Félicien Marceau, Sara Wood, Amanda Prantera, Belinda Jones

6. As Time Goes By 

Alberto Savinio, Raffaele La Capria

Arrivals

We had already been to Capri a couple of times when we decided to write a book on literary Capri, or at least about some of all the writers whom a visit to the island had inspired. There is something about this island that stimulates the imagination, provokes dreams and makes you want to make it your own; to write about your own personal Capri, to feel selected, like one who has been singled out to discover her secrets and become her lover. It was as if the island had invited us to nestle upon her bosom, to take part in and write about some of the lifes that had been lived by those who came here for different reasons and got stuck: the lotus eaters, the dreamers, the refugees, the master-builders …

The third time we visited Capri we approached the island as old regulars, feeling like many before us that this was our island, our home. No ordinary tourists, we felt we belonged to the happy few. It is so easy to fall in love with the island and easier still to believe that your love is requitted. We recalled the first time we saw its silhouette rise out of the sea and tried to find metaphors to describe it, whether with words that we had read or with our own expressions. Many had made the effort before us. The Capri-habitué Norman Douglas described the first glimpse thus:

Viewed from the clammy deck on this bright morning, the island of Nepenthe resembled a cloud. It was a silvery speck upon that limitless expanse of blue sea and sky. A south wind breathed over the Mediterranean waters, drawing up their moisture which lay couched in thick mists about its flanks and uplands. The comely outlines were barely suggested through a veil of fog. An air of unreality hung about the place. Could this be an island? A veritable island of rocks and vineyeards and houses – this pallid apparition? It looked like some snowy sea-bird or a cloud; one of those lonely clouds that stray from their fellows and drift about in wayward fashion at the bidding of every breeze.

Douglas calls the island Nepenthe in the novel South Wind (1917) – we will return to Douglas as well as the novel. Douglas spent much time together with Edwin Cerio, another writer whom we will meet repeatedly in the literature of Capri. Cerio, native Caprese, permitted himself the following poetic excursion:

The first view of Capri is a symbol of love. The island rises lovingly over the sea and offers her flowing formations of cliffs to the sun; in Dionysian heat she raises her round mountain hip to heaven, a mountain that starts voluptuously and lowers, satisfied but not exhausted, gently toward the West. To the East she proudly raises her head with a mane of laurel and opens the immense eyes of the Tiberian ruins, still full of wonder, shadowed by the mystery of the great loner, whose memory floats through the world from the highest cliff, watching Capri.

Cerio evokes the erotic promise that was and still is associated with the island. He also suggests something threatening, the thin line between love and death, by alluding to the myths of excessive pleasure and cruel murders attributed to the Roman emperor Tiberius (although Cerio does not endorse those myths; but rather mentions the mystery of the great loner).

Alberto Savinio, an Italian writer, musician and artist, visited Capri 1926 and wrote his impressions in a small book titled simply Capri when it was finally published in 1988. Savinio portrays his arrival as if he were on a sailing ship with pirates who have decided to abandon him on a deserted island. He gazes at the island that comes to light in the mist and the sea:

A soft, white cloud forms a ring around the summit of the tallest mountain. The far ends of the island cut the waves like the prows of ships. But is it really we who are approaching the island, or is the island, having broken loose from its granite moorings, moving toward us? In the middle, between the highest mountain rising on the right and the lesser ones rearing a triple summit on the left, the island gives way and slopes gently in a valley. A grey, unyielding harness of high cliffs buttresses the flanks of the unknown island, against which the waves beat and are thrown back in foaming curves, save in the middle where the milder sea penetrates in a graceful arc to lap the beach.

The island is transformed into a dream created by the writer. Other visitors have confined themselves to metaphors and similes in order to suggest what it is about this island that provokes the imagination. E.R. Gummerus is one of the foremost Capri-connoisseurs among its Swedish visitors. In Italienska vandringar (Italian Wanderings, 1966) he writes:

Whoever sees, for the first time, the contours of Capri rise out of the sea, purple blue or almost black, gets the impression of an island that is not like any other. It has been compared to a siren with head, face and bosom, but the Romantic writer Jean Paul is closer to the truth when he calls Capri a sphinx.

Also Axel Munthe, who established some myths about Capri with The Story of San Michele (1929), associated the island with a sphinx. This emphasizes the island as enigmatic, composite and contradictory. Munthe’s San Michele has been one of the destinations of our own travels to Capri and we know of course that Munthe put a sphinx at the edge of his villa and that he presented his finding of the sphinx as a mystery in his book. 

The sphinx is not only mysteriously composite; it is also threatening. Death is the penalty for not solving its riddle and Capri’s erotically tempting images are often combined with the threat of death. The German artist Arnold Böcklin was staying on the neighbouring island of Ischia when he painted The Island of Death, which became very well known near the end of the 19th century. Perhaps his view of Capri gave him the inspiration.

Capri has often been presented in this fashion, with romantic misty mountains, threatening cliffs and fanciful similes alluding to paradise as well as death. To us it suggested an alligator, lying there with its head half exposed, prominent jaws and a back that arches in a bump before disappearing into the water, as it lies eternally in wait for the many tourists it will devour.

The first time we came, we tried to guess where we would be staying when we got close enough to see the houses. Would it be the grand, palatial building high on the cliff to the left or was it somewhere to the right? The second time we already knew and the third time we could even offer directions to a young German boy who had contacted us in Naples and was grateful to hear that we were also going to Anacapri. He was heading for a seminar and we were indulgent and knowledgeable; the hotels were empty now, we thought, it was the off-season, end of March. The weather was almost as chilly as it had been when we left Oslo, but the sun came out and made it possible to sit on deck during the crossing. It was windy and the sea was rough.

When we were close enough to identify the villas, we began to point out the mythical buildings and tell the young man their histories. "Over there to the left, right on top of the dramatic slope, are the ruins of Villa Jovis, the ‘Jupiter-villa’ where the emperor Tiberius revelled in orgies after having left the court in Rome - at least according to the legend that more than any other has contributed to the myth of Capri. Right below it shines Villa Lysis like an ancient temple, built a hundred years ago by the notorious Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen, who had been inspired by the rumours of Tiberian debaucheries. High up on the right is Anacapri and there, slightly below the top, at the eye of the alligator, you can see the white gable of the house where we are heading, San Michele." In the 1950’ies Axel Munthe’s San Michele was established as a foundation with a museum attracting crowds of tourists, but it is also a haven for Swedish writers, artists and other cultural workers who can stay there while cultivating their dreams of Capri.

Cultural tourism to Capri gathered momentum in the middle of the 19th century as a popular version of the grand tour of the 18th century, which always included a longer stay in Italy. The new tourism reached its peak from the turn of the century to the end of the 1920s: Capri was still cheap enough to attract poor artists but was also fashionable enough for the international bohemians. After that cultural tourism was supplanted by mass tourism – with the exception of our haven at San Michele, where we cultural workers remain tolerably undisturbed. The transition from cultural tourism to mass tourism is symbolized by the song Isle of Capri which became very popular throughout Europe between the wars. It can still be heard, not least in the music boxes for sale in the island’s many tourist shops. The song embellished the myth of the erotically tempting island that seemed to belong to every country and every visitor and that is still marketable in the popular press. 

Those who arrived on the island in the 19th century did not look left to Villa Lysis or right to San Michele – both built around 1900. Instead they headed for the town of Capri in the middle of the island and landed, then as now, in Marina Grande. Today it is a harbour for the big ferries, in those days it was an anchoring place for the small boats that picked up the tourists arriving on the steamer from Naples, which had to anchor in the bay. From the harbour you had make the climb to the town – from the beginning of the 20th century you could take the funicular – and enter a terrace with a grand view of the bay of Naples, Vesuvius and the distant peninsula of Sorrento. As a bonus you could take a look at the fisherman Spadaro, a Caprese dressed up in fisherman’s garb in the style popularized by the 19th century German romantic poet August von Platen in his well-known poem