Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic As you approach Capri by hydrofoil, you can just make out, winding across the cliffs, a narrow carriage road that seems to have been glued on to the side of the cliffs like a child’s marble run. This is the sole route for vehicles into Anacapri, the smaller of the island’s two towns, perched on a plateau high above the sea. Among the cypresses and maritime pines above it is a medieval chapel to the archangel Michael, extended by a white-painted colonnade that evokes a Greek temple. The sense of otherworldliness grows when you reach the Villa San Michele, built at the turn of the 20th century by Axel Munthe, an eccentric Swedish doctor, writer, art collector and animal lover. Through the tiered gardens, cypress avenue and wisteria-draped pergola, you glimpse the radiant Bay of Naples, the silhouette of Vesuvius looming on the horizon. The doctor and his villa once attracted eminent guests including Henry James, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the actress Eleonora Duse. Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas were received after Wilde’s fall from grace. Today, the former residence is a museum and scholarly retreat. “It is a unique property,” says Kristina Kappelin, its director and the honorary consul of Sweden, which inherited the estate after Munthe’s death. “I can’t think of a Swede who created anything like this.”When Munthe (1857-1949) first visited the island as a young medical student in 1876, the road was still under construction. Having arrived by post-boat, he took the only other route to Anacapri — the 900-odd Phoenician Steps, a stone stairway zigzagging up the mountainside, built by the Greeks in the seventh to sixth centuries BC. This is not a house to live in. It is a showroom . . . a northerner’s idea of what an Italian house should look likeAccording to The Story of San Michele, the bestselling memoir that Munthe published in English in 1929 (a blend of truth, sentimentality and self-promoting myth), it was on this trip that he conceived the idea of buying a small house and vineyard from a local carpenter, along with the ruined chapel nearby, and transforming them into a classical domus — a Roman home.By the time Munthe could afford to realise his dream, in the 1890s, he had built a successful medical career specialising in “nervous cases”, as he described them. The clients who sought him out in Paris, Rome and Capri included European aristocrats and American millionaires — and their privileged but depressed wives. Bengt Jangfeldt, his biographer, tells me these women, including the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, “went crazy about Munthe”. His sexual magnetism may have played a part in his two failed marriages; and certainly in the close friendship he enjoyed with Victoria, the crown princess and later queen of Sweden, as her personal physician and confidant, who followed him to Capri. Illustrious visitors have been withdrawing to Capri in search of peace and privacy for more than 2,000 years. After the Greeks, the Romans came — the emperor Tiberius, according to ancient sources, lived here for a decade of debauchery in a vast complex known as the Villa of Jupiter. In Munthe’s time, the peasants, when digging the soil, would regularly come across what they dismissed as roba di Timberio (“Tiberius’s stuff”): fragments of marble sculptures, friezes, inscriptions, amphorae full of coins. Some of the most striking pieces were incorporated into the villa. When excavating the grounds, Munthe also opened up an ancient Roman cubiculum beneath the chapel, which contained frescoes of what he described as “dancing nymphs”. Their graceful, shadowy figures can still be seen on the wall beneath artistically arranged funerary inscriptions. The villa is a Roman-style fantasy, full of symbolism and the ghosts of bygone times. “This is not a house to live in,” Jangfeldt tells me. “It is a showroom . . . a northerner’s idea of what an Italian house should look like.”In the centre of the small atrium is a Roman well-mouth carved with garlands and ox heads, which Munthe claimed to have been given by the sisters of a convent in Naples in gratitude for his help during a cholera epidemic. In the bedroom is an oversized pseudo-Gothic fireplace, a 15th-century military camp bed, and a 16th-century wooden statue of a dog. The sculpture loggia, an open-air cloister, displays a wealth of artworks, including what may be a contemporary head of Tiberius and a 12th or 13th-century mosaic table.If Munthe, like many an antiquarian, can be criticised for appropriating another society’s treasures, Mario Staiano, former mayor of Anacapri, counters that “he kept everything here, and . . . so he made us understand that Capri had a history”. Moreover, at a time when there were few doctors on the island, Munthe worked tirelessly, and free of charge, to cure the sick. As a result, says Jangfeldt, “he was worshipped here like a saint”.When Munthe’s eyesight began to fail, he moved to a nearby medieval tower, the Torre Materita, which faced west and so protected his sensitive eyes from the most intense sunlight. Victoria later bought her own villa, the Casa Caprile, just up the hill. The villa San Michele was rented out in the 1920s, but in his will, Munthe wished his villa to be used as a base for Sweden’s “students, artists, researchers, journalists or other guests”; every year, about 80-90 scholarship holders stay at the guest house. The villa and gardens, open to the public, attract 125,000 visitors annually.Munthe had another ambition. He wanted to stop the traditional Caprese hunting of migratory birds such as quails, larks and golden orioles, “to be eaten with delight in the smart restaurants of Paris”. He bought the rocky Mount Barbarossa, towering over San Michele, complete with a 1,000-year-old castle, so that he could forbid the practice there. When the Italian translation of his book was published in 1932, he attached a preface that aimed to bring this “mass murder” to the attention of Il Duce himself. As Jangfeldt writes, Munthe’s suggestion fitted in with Mussolini’s plans to make the island “a showcase for Fascism”. In November 1932, his government passed a decree banning “the hunting of birds . . . on the island of Capri in all forms and at all times, until further notice”. “It was worth writing a book for such a prize,” Munthe declared in a 1930s BBC radio programme, in his precise, accented English. Castello Barbarossa is now an ornithological station monitoring birds in the region, a fitting tribute to one of this storied island’s defining legends.villasanmichele.euFind out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
