Capri - Capri in Art and Literature

Capri in Art and Literature

In the latter half of the 19th century, Capri became a popular resort for European artists, writers and other celebrities. The book that spawned the 19th century fascination with Capri in France, Germany, and England was Entdeckung der blauen Grotte auf der Insel Capri, 'Discovery of the Blue Grotto on the Isle of Capri', by the German painter and writer August Kopisch, in which he describes his 1826 stay on the island and his (re)discovery of the Blue Grotto.

John Singer Sargent and Frank Hyde are among the prominent artists who stayed on the island around the late 1870s. Sargent is known for his series of portraits featuring local model Rosina Ferrara. Claude Debussy refers to the island's hills in the title of his impressionistic prélude Les collines d'Anacapri (1910). Capri is the setting for "The Lotus Eater" (1945), a short story by Somerset Maugham. In the story, the protagonist from Boston comes to Capri on a holiday and is so enchanted by the place he gives up his job and decides to spend the rest of his life in leisure there. British novelist Compton Mackenzie lived there from 1913 to 1920, with later visits, and set some of his work on the island, e.g. Vestal Fire (1927).

As well as being a haven for writers and artists, Capri served as a relatively safe place for foreign gay men and lesbians to lead a more open life; a small nucleus of them were attracted to live there, overlapping to some extent with the creative types mentioned above. Poet August von Platen-Hallermünde was one of the first. Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen wrote the roman à clef Et le feu s’éteignit sur la mer (1910) about Capri and its residents in the early 20th century, causing a minor scandal. Fersen's life on Capri became the subject of Roger Peyrefitte's fictionalised biography, L'Exilé de Capri. A satirical presentation of the island's lesbian colony is made in Mackenzie's 1928 novel Extraordinary Women (unrelated to the Dominican film of the same name), inspired by the affairs of American painter Romaine Brooks (in the novel, under the pseudonym of Olimpia Leigh). One of the island's most famous foreign gay exiles was Norman Douglas; his novel South Wind (1917) is a thinly fictionalised description of Capri's residents and visitors, and a number of his other works, both books and pamphlets, deal with the island, including Capri (1930) and his last work, A Footnote on Capri (1952).

Memoirs set on Capri include Edwin Cerio's Aria di Capri (1928) (translated as That Capri Air), which contains a number of historical and biographical essays on the island, including a tribute to Norman Douglas; The Story of San Michele (1929) by Swedish royal physician Axel Munthe (1857–1949), who built a villa of that name and Shirley Hazzard's Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000), about her reminiscences of Graham Greene.

The Last Legion, a historical fantasy novel by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, is partly set on the island of Capri, where Romulus is imprisoned after a failed rescue attempt in Ravenna by Aurelianus. Romulus discovers the sword of Julius Caesar hidden in one of Tiberius's villas, which is revealed at the end of the novel to be the legendary sword Excalibur. Parts of the 2007 film adaptation were subsequently filmed on the island.

French singer Hervé Vilard released the song "Capri c'est fini" in 1965, which became a worldwide hit.