Just as the movie carries a rebellious and subversive tone beneath the both defiant and melancholy beauty of Bardot, Casa Malaparte bears the story of its contradictory and ambiguous owner and resident, Curzio Malaparte. Malaparte wanted the house to reflect his own personal character and become a place for solitary contemplation and writing. Especially the characteristic shape of the house, with a monumental stairway leading up to the roof. Malaparte was at the time an influential writer, editor and journalist. On my last trip to Capri in the mid 80s, I had no idea how to find it, pre-internet. If there ever was a house that was marked by the personality of its owner, it’s Casa Malaparte. It sits on a dangerous cliff 32 metres above the sea overlooking the Gulf of Salerno. He was educated at Collegio Cicognini in Prato and at La Sapienza University of Rome. It takes an hour and a half to walk there from Capri's Piazzetta at the summit of the His house is Capri was a sanctuary that he built supposedly to protect his intimacy and creativity, open to the sea, surrounded by nature. On the roof is a freestanding curving white wall of increasing height. The property where the house stands belongs today to the Giorgio Ronchi Foundation, a scientific foundation, and is used only for study and cultural events. In 1961, Jean-Luc Godard shot his acclaimed film Le Mépris in Villa Malaparte. The soldier in his bunker and outside his tortuous life. A platform from which to admire the overwhelming spectacle of the surrounding nature, which includes If the figure of Curzio Malaparte is not better known today it is, to a great extent, because of his shameless defense of fascism during his earlier years. It generates a language that is foreign to its environment, imposing its own rules by giving it a monumental character.
Casa Malaparte, widely regarded as one of the most unique residences in modern architecture, has traditionally been attributed to Adalberto Libera, the architect Curzio Malaparte hired to build him a house atop a cliff in Punta Masullo, Capri. This sensitivity is also reinforced in the choice of materials, rejecting the use of the 'concrete characteristic' of other modern buildings of the period. Casa Malaparte was abandoned and neglected after the death of Curzio Malaparte in 1957. He later became interested in Maoism, and when he died in 1957, he left Casa Malaparte to the people of China. They felt offended by the way he spoke about them in his books or articles. The red house surrounded and dwarfed by rugged rocks seems an appropriate metaphor for a man battling his ghosts and his memories. His heirs challenged the will, and while Casa Malaparte was vacant, it was featured in “Contempt” (“Le Mepris”), a 1963 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance. The house was conceived around 1937 by the well-known Casa Malaparte is a red masonry box with reverse pyramidal stairs leading to the roof patio. In this film, the architecture takes on a leading role and becomes closely linked to the script of the film. A place where he could hide from everything and be alone.
He also bought Villa Hildebrand, which had been the residence of Italian writer and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. The marble sunken bath in the bedroom of his mistress still exists and functions. He once said: "Now I live on an island, in an austere and melancholy house, which I built myself on a lonely cliff above the sea.
Today the house is used for serious study and cultural events.
Malaparte, who never refrained from offending someone, described them as perverted, among other things.Malaparte apparently longed for a life of tranquility and seclusion. He worked as director of press relations for the Versailles Peace Conference and became cultural attaché with the Italian embassy in Poland, the youngest Italian diplomat ever. Apparently, his exotic German name made him feel different from the other children.
The staircase is presented as a ritual of arrival to the point at which the landscape finally unfolds entirely to visitors.After the death of Curzio Malaparte in 1957 the house—like other great modern works such as the Ville Savoye by Le Corbusier or E-1027 by Eileen Gray—was completely abandoned, spending much of the twentieth century in a state of total disrepair.
Casa Malaparte is a red masonry box with reverse pyramidal stairs leading to the roof patio. It is in this architectural promenade that the monumentality of Villa Malaparte is manifested most clearly.