Return to Love Island

It lost one of its stelle last year, but its self-assurance remains undented. We were received with the effusiveness usually secured only by having previously overtipped on a Proustian scale. The flourish with which our innumerable mini-courses were served was part of their rich flavour.

After modest Positano, we drove to Sorrento (now a prolonged traffic jam: less a place to come back to than one to despair of ever getting out of) to catch the ferry to Capri. We hadn’t been to the island since 1964, when we boarded an aliscafo from Naples, which set out in the kind of storm that drowned Shelley. We were on our way to watch Julie Christie being directed by John Schlesinger in one of the naughtier scenes in Darling (the one where she seduces the waiter, her gay friend’s local lover).

Indulging his penchant for the outrageous, John arranged an epicene parade in the main square of the types who have, for centuries, camped it up on the island. However, the Schlesinger choice of extras was so wild that the mayor threatened to kick us out. Our Italian producer, Jo Janni, rushed in with apologies, and an invitation to dine with Julie, and our expulsion was rescinded.

Forty years ago, we got no higher than the Grand Hotel Quisisana, in the main town, where the unit was quartered (its name means, literally, “Here one is healed”; provided one is well heeled also). This time, we were met by an open limousine so wide that it seemed certain to scrape both sides of the lane that took us to exclusivissimo Anacapri, on an uphill Cresta run towards the summit of Monte Solaro.

Once upon a time, the only way up was by climbing 777 steps, said by Axel Munthe, in his 1929 bestseller The Story of San Michele, to have been cut by the Phoenicians. The indeed Grand Hotel (even our modest room had its own private swimming pool) is some few hundred yards from the house that Axel Munthe built — or, rather, had local masons build on his constantly revised instructions.

Back in the 1960s, Capri was still the elite, unspoilt place for sin and sun. The ciucci — local donkeys — still plodded, as they had for the Romans. Now, the harbour and the main town are a prime day-tripper destination, bulging with buses. After dusk, though, when the tours go back down to the Marina Grande, Anacapri is above the grockle-line. The village has a winding main street with a good little restaurant, La Rondinella, if you have had enough of the designer dinners at the Capri Palace’s one-star L’Olivo. A colourful market enlivens the walkway to the Villa San Michele.

Axel Munthe has to take the credit, and the blame, for putting Anacapri back on the map almost two millenniums after Tiberius ran the Roman empire from his choice of a dozen palaces on the island. On his first visit, in the 1870s, Munthe found the chapel of San Michele in ruins. Mastro Vincenzo, who had helped himself to the stones to build his adjacent garden wall, was getting old and wanted to sell the whole area. As they talked, one of his chickens scratched up a coin that the young Swede recognised (so he says) as bearing the head of the Emperor Augustus. “Not worth a baiocco (ha’penny),” Vincenzo said.

Most of the materials for the well-marbled house — now a rather formal museum — came from what the peasants called “roba di Timberio”: Tiberius’s junk. Local mispronunciation had inserted an “m” in the name of an emperor blackened by the stories of his debauchery. These were eagerly retailed by tart Tacitus and salacious Suetonius, who was secretary to the Emperor Hadrian and had access to the imperial records, as well as a gossip columnist’s zeal for scandal. Munthe insists that a moral paragon was wilfully abused. Perhaps the Swede suffered from a defectively virtuous imagination: judging from his clean and tidy dream house, Axel led a life of rectilinear Nordic propriety.

Today’s archeologists would wince at the shamelessness with which Munthe appropriated plunder from all over the island. His buddy, the spirit of the place, showed him where to find his sphinx and other treasures. The Anacapresi themselves had little respect for antiquity. Mastro Vincenzo told him how, years earlier, he had found a subterranean room under his house, its red walls all painted with “Cristiani, tutti spogliati, ballando come dei pazzi”: Christians stark naked and dancing like crazy. It took the old peasant several days to scrape it all off and cement the walls to make a cistern for rainwater. The building work turned up several jars of Roman coins. They even found a Greek skeleton, with a coin — fare for Charon, the ferryman of the dead — in its mouth.

Like almost every foreigner who plants himself among peasants, the good doctor made at least one enemy, when he tried to stop the annual cull of migrant birds by the local butcher. Using caged decoys, the callous brute netted thousands for sale to Parisian restaurants. Even the local prelate got his cut and was known as “il vescovo di quaglie”, the quailing bishop, you might say.

Munthe offered to buy the hunting ground, the peak capped by the castle of the Saracen pirate Barbarossa. However, the butcher made so much money from his trade that whenever a price had been agreed, he doubled it. Eventually, the butcher fell ill. He was being given the last rites when Dr Munthe stepped in, drained a pint of pus from the invalid’s lung, and saved his life; and that of countless migrant birds, since the penitent scoundrel then sold his saviour the mountain, which is now a bird sanctuary.

As you walk around his handsomely landscaped gardens, with their superb views towards Ischia and Naples, Munthe’s official ghost seems so saintly that you begin to long for at least a few lurid rumours about what he got up to when he wasn’t admiring the unique flora that crop up in the sheltered crannies on the all-right-for-goats climb to the Villa Jovis at the island’s summit.

Continued on page 2

()

Everyone else who ever lived on Capri, from Caligula to Norman Douglas, from Noël Coward — who sang about that (gay) bar on the Piccola Marina — to Graham Greene, took the spirit of the place to be considerably goatier — Capri is literally “Goats’ Island” — than Munthe would have you believe.

Il Rosaio, the white villa where the eccentric Greene — always in flight from the centre, and its imprisoning stability — lived, intermittently, for several decades, writing his modest 350 words a day, can be found just up the road from Munthe’s place, though some tetchy neighbour objected to having a plaque mark his tenancy.

Shirley Hazzard’s Greene on Capri recaptures the whole louche cast of expatriates, great and forgotten — including Turgenev, Lenin, Rilke, DH Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie — whose ghosts grow paler these days, crowded out by mass tourism. Gracie Fields, a singer whose voice sang unrecognised on a recent University Challenge — was regarded as positively unpatriotic, back in the 1940s, when our Gracie removed herself from chilly England and opened a bar with an Italian (imagine!) on the Piccola Marina.

The site of the Emperor Tiberius’s favourite Villa Damecuta, high above the Blue Grotto, is the perfect place — a 10-minute bus ride from the village — for a quiet picnic. Nothing much, apart from its foundations, is left of the emperor’s pleasure dome. There is no sign, for example, of the swimming pool in which, Suetonius tells us, he took great pleasure in very young company.

Up there, you share the imperial sense of being on top of the world, but how Tiberius managed to run his empire from an island three miles offshore, with no means of communication apart from smoke signals and runners, is an abiding mystery. For a while he delegated everything to his enforcer in Rome, Sejanus, whose ambition became tyrannical. Tiberius trusted him blindly and looked forward to his visits, until one day, warned that a coup was imminent, the emperor handed his henchman his own death warrant, in a sealed letter, to carry to the senate, where it was opened and read out. Exit Sejanus. Death itself needed no warrant when it came for the 78-year-old Tiberius.

The oddest modern building on the island is the Casa Come Me (House Like Me), a long, flat, rectangular hangar built by the ineffably egotistic Curzio Malaparte (the anti-Buonaparte pseudonym of Kurt Erich Suckert). In return for unpleasant services rendered to fascism, Mussolini gave Malaparte licence to build in a prime location on an inaccessible promontory, close to the sea. Malaparte was one of those odious, opportunistic writers (after the war, he converted to Communism) who you wish will turn out to be unreadable, but isn’t: his riveting account of the terminal days of Hitler’s Reich, Kaputt, is an obscenely vivid classic. Very honourably, Graham Greene refused the Malaparte Prize when it was offered to him, but I doubt if he thought as little of the author’s work as of the man himself.

Pablo Neruda wrote about “the hidden Capri, entered only after a long pilgrimage... when you have lost the label of tourist”. It is the oldest illusion of all who have loved and lived near the Med to suppose that the locals think of us differently from the annual swarm of tourists. Michael Radford’s lovely little movie Il Postino, about Neruda in exile, was partly shot on Capri. Its terminally ill star, Massimo Troisi, who played the postman, could work only one hour a day, which makes the movie a miracle of cinematic ingenuity. Perhaps the spirit of the place lent a hand, though no Dr Munthe was there to save Massimo, who died just before they wrapped.