Ermenegildo Zegna fragrances UOMO, casa Malaparte Capri Italy

One of the most captivating and unusual structures in the world, Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri is an ode to solitude.
Could there be a more ravishing work of architecture than Casa Malaparte? “A beautiful thing, forged out of a brutal environment,” is how architect Simon Jacobsen describes this minimalist plinth of a house, built in 1942 atop a craggy promontory on the island of Capri. “It makes you think of Greta Garbo’s famous line, ‘I want to be alone.’ ” Its owner did, by all accounts. Curzio Malaparte was a brash man of letters who fell afoul of Mussolini in 1933 and was exiled to a speck of land in the Mediterranean. Banishment had a paradoxical effect: Upon his release, Malaparte longed for more remoteness and seclusion. After buying a site on Capri’s eastern coastline, he had the noted architect Adalberto Libera draw up plans for a home, but later threw them out in favor of his own vision—a stolid, jutting form, with a lyrical windbreak on top and a tapering exterior staircase. “A house like me,” Malaparte often said. Today the dwelling is owned by the writer’s heirs and most easily seen by boat (or by revisiting Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, in which the roof provides a sunbathing venue for Brigitte Bardot). Interior designer Steven Volpe got a rare private invitation years ago and remembers walking the tortuous footpath, touring the hauntingly spartan rooms—and, most vividly, climbing to the rooftop. “Up there it was dream-like,” he recalls. “You feel like you’re in heaven.”

architecturaldigest.com