by Matthew Fort
In short order they take their first objective, the Villa Jovis, pose, snap away, tick it off and move on, to the Villa Lysis, the Villa Malaparte, the Villa San Michele, the Piccola Marina, pose, snap, tick at each. And then, they buy gewgaws, lick ice creams, sip Coke or Aperol spritzers in the Piazzetta before tracking back to the funicular, to the port, to their aliscafi and to the resorts from which they’d set off earlier in the day.
This daily onslaught brings with it obvious logistical challenges. Capri neither produces food nor has the space to deal with rubbish on the scale needed. Everything has to be brought or taken away by boat. Through each night all the detritus of the preceding day is collected and carried off to be dumped on sites in the mainland. At the same time, all the food, water and other supplies needed to keep each day’s invading army on the march are landed and distributed by the electric buggies. Given the scale and relentless nature of the invasion, it’s a miracle of practical organisation.
‘Tourism is a blessing and a bane,’ Dr Giuseppe Aprea tells me. Dr Aprea is the chief archivist of Capri. He has a nose like that of Franceso Sforza in the Bonifacio Bembo portrait, lively, expressive eyes and receding grey hair. ‘Economically it’s vital. We can’t survive without it. The trouble is that Capri’s true character disappears when the tourists arrive each day. There’s just a short time at the beginning and the end of the day when the real Capri shows itself.’
‘Do you think living on an island creates a different mentality or sense of identity?’ I ask.
Dr Aprea considers for a moment.
‘I think so. It all depends on our relationship with the sea. By definition, an island is surrounded by water. The sea is a barrier, our protection. It’s also a highway. You came here by sea. Trade comes over it. Also pirates and invaders. And it’s what keeps us here. It turns each island into a prison. To get even to Naples requires an effort, to get to London is a major undertaking. So it’s easier to stay inside our prison.
‘Think about Britain and Europe. You’re attracted and repelled at the same time by Europe. So is the Channel a channel of communication, a channel for your protection or a channel to keep you in?’
It’s evening and I settle down to a first Campari soda at the Bar Tiberio on the Piazzetta (in reality, the Piazza Umberto), surrounded by a herd of Aperol spritzer drinkers.
At a table just down from mine, a goaty man of middle years, with a face the colour of putty and mycelium hair, is holding court. He’s wearing a canary-yellow jacket, an orange pork-pie straw hat and a multicoloured silk scarf. His hand rests lightly and briefly on the bare, brown arm of a very pretty girl perhaps a third his age (and twice as old as he’ll ever be). She’s smoking, holding her cigarette between long, elegant fingers that taper to long, elegant nails the colour of an English post box. Her skin has the lustre and colour of lovingly tended teak. Another girl walks past my table and joins them. Her thong is clearly visible and her tight, globular buttocks oscillate beneath a dress that has the shifting transparency of water. Her hair cascades in thick, tawny tresses to below her waist.
The man in the canary-yellow jacket plays host to a stream of nymphs and satyrs. He’s like Pan, the master of the revels. As each arrives or departs, he lets his hand casually brush the arm of the girl beside him. Presently, the three are joined by a barrel-chested man with steel-grey hair wearing a dazzling white shirt, black trousers, braces like sticks of rock and loafers without socks; and by a stylish woman, a mature version of the figures into which the two younger women will grow. She’s wearing a dress, the principal function of which is to show off the magnificence of her breasts. Rather disingenuously, she repeatedly tries to draw the two sides of the revealing V of the dress closer together, with little success. The conversation gushes between the five of them. A few minutes later they’re joined by a lanky young man, who pulls up a chair, takes out his mobile phone, and disappears into it.
There’s a minor kerfuffle as some mega-millionaire and his entourage noisily settle into the ringside seats at an adjacent bar, while a circus of women of all ages mill about dressed in breaths of clothing shifting back and forth over bras and knickers – sometimes no bras and no knickers – revealing everything and nothing; swaying back and forth over tanned, glazed legs; above manicured feet shod in sandals thonged halfway up the calf; low-slung, glittering, gold and silver and cerise tip-top flip-flops; heels stacked as high as supermarket shelves; trainers never designed for training. And men, too, smooth-cheeked and stubble-shaded, shabby-chic, chicly shabby, whippet-thin, pillow-plump, portly as a barrel, cucumber-cool, manly-cool, just-look-at-me-I’m-so-cool-cool, as cool as ironed shorts, pressed jeans, crisp linen, tasselled loafers, and Ray-ban shades can make them.
It’s a joy to sit and watch this parade of sweet narcissism and sex, signifying who is getting it, who isn’t getting it, who’s up for it, who would like to be up for it, who wants more of it, irrespective of race, colour, creed or gender. It isn’t a market. It’s too blatant, too vivacious, too innocent to be commercial. It’s the mating display of peacocks and peahens.
There’s one role that some islands play that Dr Aprea hadn’t identified – an island as a refuge. Certainly a significant number of writers, artists and intellectuals settled on Capri for that reason. Largely forgotten figures such as Robert Ross, E. F. Benson, Compton Mackenzie, and Norman Douglas; not-such-forgotten writers such as Graham Greene, Maxim Gorky, Somerset Maugham, Axel Munthe (who welcomed Oscar Wilde to the Villa San Michele in 1897 after Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol) and Curzio Malaparte, the nom-de-plume of Kurt Suckert; and such diverse figures as Jacques Fersen, Alfred Krupp, Gracie Fields and Mariah Carey have all sought refuge on Capri, drawn by the dramatic beauty of the landscape, mildness of the climate, easy pace of island life, and relative ease of accessibility.
A good many, although not all, of the famous foreigners also took advantage of what many perceive as Capri’s tolerance of idiosyncratic sexual proclivities, a tradition that can be traced back to Tiberius and his ‘minnows’ as reported by Suetonius, that notoriously unreliable historian of ancient Rome, who never allowed the truth to inhibit a juicy titbit.
‘I don’t think the Capresi are naturally more inclined to homosexuality or promiscuity than anyone else,’ Anna Federica of the Biblioteca del Centro Caprense Ignazio Cerio says gently when I put this point to her. ‘I think it had more to do with poverty than anything else. Islanders were very poor in those days. Becoming the lover of a rich foreigner was a way out of the poverty of peasant life.’
The next day I wander down the road that leads from Capri town to the Marina Grande. About 500 metres down the hill is the Cimitero Acattolico, or the cemetery ‘for all Non-Catholics irrespective of Race or Religion’ as the plaque by the entrance puts it, that had been established by George Heyward, a native of Bury St Edmunds, later living in New York, a curious conjunction of places. It’s a shady oasis of peace, full of the graves of foreigners.
In the case of Norman Douglas, the ‘irrespective of Race or Religion’ embrace is just as well. If Douglas subscribed to any belief, it was a rather personalised hedonism. He was Pagan not Protestant, dedicated to the sins of the flesh rather than aspirations of the spirit. The last words he uttered before he died on Capri in 1952 were, ‘Get these fucking nuns away from me.’
He’d been diplomat, campaigner, writer, reporter, husband, father, bi-sexual satyr, culinary guru, and in a long and rackety life – once or twice he had to leave countries in a hurry as a result of his sexual peccadilloes – he spent long periods on Capri. During one he became friends with, and mentor to, Elizabeth David.
‘The prospect of a day in Norman’s company was exhilarating,’ she wrote in a delightful memoir of him in the Spectator in 1962. ‘In Alone the passage in which he describes the authentic pre-1914 macaroni as “those macaroni of a lily-like candour” (enviable phrase – who else could have written it?), have led many people to believe that Norman Douglas was a great epicure
in matters gastronomical; and so he was in an uncommon way; in a way few mortals can hope ever again to become. His way was most certainly not the way of the solemn wine-sipper or of the grave debater of recipes … it was not Norman’s way to give lectures. These pieces of information emerged gradually, in the course of walks, sessions at the tavern, apropos in a chance remark. It was up to you to put two and two together if you were sufficiently interested.’
Douglas actually produced a cookery book, Venus in the Kitchen. It’s an amusing assembly, with recipes for the likes of Athenian Eels, Vulvae Steriles, Pheasant à la Hannibal and Salad Rocket (rather ahead of its time), but he lacks David’s gift for glittering, almost epigrammatic, evocation of food and place. As she pointed out in the Spectator article, his genius lay in informal allusion, not formal instruction.
More typical of him is Old Calabria, a record of various travels he made in Southern Italy in 1915, that deserves to be treasured for the chapter on Father Joseph, the Flying Monk of Copertino, alone: a humorous tour de force. Old Calabria also contains one of my favourite sentences in all travel literature – ‘in the morning the etymological harvest surpassed my wildest expectations’. Such elegance on the subject of bed-bugs.
Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that he has a large, stern gravestone of grey slate. It’s inscribed with his name, the place and date of his birth – Thuringen 8:12:1868 – the place and date of his death – Capri 9:2:1952 – and the words ‘Omne Eodem Cogimur’ – ‘We end in the same place’ or ‘We all are herded to the same place’ or ‘All on the same ferry’, depending on which translation you look up. It’s a quotation from Horace’s Ode 2.3, a suitably ironic reflection from such a worldly ironist.
His grave is surrounded by less familiar figures, whose names and inscriptions are a testament to Capri’s mysterious appeal to writers, artists, dreamers, and mountebanks of every hue. Here Hungarians, Finns, Russians, French, Germans, English, Americans, Jews and Danes lie skeletal cheek by skeletal jowl in the dappled shade, their headstones for the most part crumbling. The German names roll like characters in the Nibelungenlied. The English names – Pakenham, Beauclerk, Archibald, Lawson – seem very prosaic by comparison.
In life, Douglas formed an unlikely friendship with another long-time Capri resident, Gracie Fields. Indeed, she came to Capri because she’d read his novel, South Wind. Her well-maintained grave in white marble stands above and apart from the genteel decay of the rest of the inmates. ‘Gracie Fields In Alperovici 9-1-1898 – 27-9-1979’ reads the surprisingly plain inscription. Alperovici was the name of her third and last husband, Boris Alperovici, a Romanian odd-job man. They were married for twenty-seven years and he’s buried in the same grave.
Below the headstone is another, independent small slab to ‘Our Gracie + 27.9.1979’. That’s something that used to annoy Boris. ‘She is not your Gracie, she is my Gracie. She is Grace Alperovici,’ he used to say. She bought a house on the island in 1933, spent much time here before the war, and lived on Capri permanently after it, until her death. It was a long way from the room above a chippy in Rochdale, where she was born. She would always be Our Gracie, whatever Boris said, homely, touchable, real, one of us. I hum a bit of her theme song, ‘Sally’.
One of the shades keeping Our Gracie and Norman Douglas company in the Cimitero Acattolico is Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen, scion of one of France’s steel families and a minor French novelist. Even the keenest students of French Literature might be ignorant of his novel, Lord Lyllian, published in 1905, in which the hero, the same Lord Lyllian, ‘departs on a wild odyssey of sexual debauchery, is seduced by a character who seems awfully similar to Oscar Wilde, falls in love with girls and boys, and is finally killed by a boy’ as the summary on Wikipedia puts it. Racy stuff, clearly, but possibly no more than you might expect from the author of Musique sur tes lèvres (Ebauches et Débauches); L’Hymnaire d’Adonis: à la façon de M. le marquis de Sade; Notre-Dame des Mers Mortes, and Le Baiser de Narcisse.
Fersen used his wealth to build the Villa Lysis in 1905 as a home for himself and his lover, Nino Cesarini. It lies at the end of one of Capri’s steep and winding paths, high among a grove of pines, right on the edge of a vertiginous cliff that plunges about 600 metres down to the sea. In one direction it looks out through the screen of pines to the Marina Grande, in the other straight out to sea. Incised above the portico leading to the front steps is the inscription ‘Amori et Dolori Sacrum’ (A Shrine to Love and Sorrow).
The outward structure has the squared-up formality of neo-classicism, but the interior has a wonderful airy fluidity. The largely empty rooms are full of light. Not many of Fersen’s possessions or furniture are in evidence, but there’s supple decorative plasterwork and a metal banister with the swirl and sweeping elegance of Liberty, while downstairs is the stanza dell opio, a room dedicated to smoking opium (how can you not like a house that has an opium room? So much more interesting than a games room or home gym), where art nouveau flamboyance, art deco regularity and classical ornamentation all combine with improbable grace. I’m also struck by the bathrooms, which are temples to hedonism and the hygiene technology of the period.
Fersen killed himself in 1923, with a cocktail of cocaine and champagne it’s said, a rather sybaritic method of suicide. Nino Cesarini went back to Rome. While Fersen’s life and death seem in keeping with the motto on the portico, his villa is the antithesis, full of sunshine and gaiety and life.
After the luminous beauty of the Villa Lysis, the Villa Jovis, the Villa of Jupiter further up the headland, exudes the dour efficiency of the Romans. Jupiter, the god of the sky and thunder, was the top god for the Romans, who sacrificed a white ox or lamb to him on the Ides of January. In truth, as gods go, he was quite boring. Tiberius, on the other hand, was a good deal more quirky, even by the standards of Roman emperors.
He’d built the Villa Jovis in AD 27, and from it he governed the Roman Empire until his death in AD 37, admittedly in a somewhat haphazard fashion, amusing himself the while, according to Suetonius, anyway, by swimming with his ‘minnows’, young men, in the waters around the island. It would have been like running the British Empire from the Isle of Wight.
Next to the villa is a point from which Tiberius had people he didn’t care for hurled several hundred metres to the rocks below. Extraordinary engineers, soldiers and administrators though they were, it strikes me that the Romans didn’t have much sense of light-hearted fun unless it involved a disembowelling or two or animals rending people to bits. On the other hand, it’s possible that Tiberius has been roughly treated by contemporary Roman historians and commentators. Unlike a good many Roman emperors he left a fortune of nearly three billion sesterces, largely because he was sensible enough to avoid costly wars.
To balance the absolutist nature of the Villa Jovis, I head for the Villa Krupp, formerly the Villa Blaesus, which the great Russian writer, Maxim Gorky, rented when he first arrived on Capri in 1906. He lived on the island off and on until 1913. I’ve been an admirer of Gorky’s since I read his three volumes of autobiography, or memoirs rather, My Childhood, In the World and My Universities. The first of these, in particular, is masterly; an affectionate, humane and unsparing portrayal of growing up in poverty in rural nineteenth-century Russia.
On an earlier visit to Capri, I came across an exhibition of photographs of Gorky and his circle taken during his time on Capri, in the Villa Lysis, of all places. They captured the exuberant egocentricity of the man, and included two of him entertaining Lenin, in one of which Lenin was playing chess. Lenin stayed with Gorky in 1908 and 1910. By all accounts, he was a prickly guest and not a good loser at the game (or indeed, at anything, his later life suggests), but he was an energetic tourist, and he took to local food with gusto. He was reported to have enjoyed scialatelli alla ciamurra, a pasta dish made with olives and anchovies, and calamari con patate. There’s something beguiling about the idea of the revolutionary plotting the overthrow of the world order while sucking pasta
into his mouth and sipping a glass of white wine, his napkin tucked into his shirt collar.
By all accounts, Gorky was a generous host and master of the revels. Improbably, or so it seems to me, he established a School for Revolutionaries in the villa as well. It would be difficult to think of a more bizarre place to teach revolutionary dialectic, develop radical cell structures and practise bomb throwing. It would have been the equivalent of setting up a theological college in Sodom and Gomorrah. Gorky was nothing if not a survivor. He died in Russia in 1938 aged sixty-eight.
The story of his successor at the Villa Blaesus, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, known as Fritz, the German steel and armaments magnate, ended less happily. He committed suicide after he was exposed as a homosexual in a German newspaper.
Subsequently, the villa has been turned into a hotel bearing Krupp’s name. It’s out of respect for Gorky that I climb the many steps on the seaward side of the hotel, overlooking the Piccola Marina. I pause to enjoy the view and reflect on the piquant conjunction of a great writer, a Russian revolutionary and a capitalist industrialist, all sharing a similar taste in property and dramatic panoramas.
As I step out on the terrace, hot and perspiring, a small man in a white shirt suddenly appears and bars my way. I explain to him the nature of my mission.
‘That was a long time ago,’ he says without budging. ‘You can’t come in.’
‘At least, please can I have a drink on the terrace?’ I say.