Curzio Malaparte: Casa Malaparte, 1938

When it came to writing, Curzio Malaparte was a man on fire. He was a journalist and an essayist, a novelist and a playwright. When it came to politics, Malaparte was a human weather vane. He was a republican, a nationalist, a fascist, and a communist. While he was dying of cancer in 1957, Malaparte turned the Roman clinic where he was undergoing treatment into the set of a postwar opera buffa. Lying in state, he was paid homage by the most notable of his countrymen, joined the Communist Party, converted to Catholicism, and then, totally synchronized with the prevailing power structure, expired. The fifty-nine-year-old writer left behind a literary legacy that, in its opportunistic relationship to historical “necessity,” mirrored nothing less than the convulsive contractions that led to the birth of modern Italy.

If there was one constant in the contradictory trajectory of Malaparte’s life, it was his fidelity to a dream he embraced in 1938. The topic of his fantasy was nothing remarkable—a retreat where he could pursue his writing without distraction. The location was, however, the stuff of legend. Malaparte fell in love with a rocky peninsula called Capo Massullo on the coast of Capri. Barely 100 feet long by 30 feet wide, bounded on three sides by cliffs plummeting 650 feet into the Mediterranean Sea, Capo Massullo is a tapered finger sticking out into an eternity of blue. In Curzio Malaparte, Capo Massullo found both a lover and a colonizer.

The house Malaparte dreamed into being is arguably the century’s most eloquent marriage of landscape and architecture. Initially, Malaparte consulted with Roman architect Adalberto Libera, but the final