20th and 21st Centuries
Several novels were written about Capri in the early 20th century by authors who lived here, including Fersen, Douglas, and Mackenzie: Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen wrote the roman à clef Et le feu s’èteignit sur le mer (1910), causing a minor scandal. Fersen's life on Capri became the subject of Roger Peyrefitte's fictionalised biography, L'Exile de Capri. Norman Douglas's novel South Wind is a thinly fictionalized 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). A satirical presentation of the island's lesbian colony in the 1920s is made in Compton Mackenzie's novel Extraordinary Women (1928).
Ignazio Cerio's son, author and engineer Edwin Cerio, wrote several books about life on Capri and also continued the work of his father in cataloging the local flora and fauna. In 1920, as a self-proclaimed Liberal at a time when the Fascists were gaining ground in the rest of Italy, he was elected Mayor of Capri. Although he held this post for just three years, he greatly affected the way that the island would be governed for the rest of the century. To prevent Milanese property developers from destroying the traditional ambience of Capri, he organised in 1922 a "conference for the defence of the landscape", whose planning groundrules still influence the government of Capri. His passionate opposition to what he called the "sharks" who were building hotels, apartment blocks and department stores was not popular with everyone, however, and in 1923 he was voted out of office.
In 1995 the Capri Film Festival was founded, which takes place every December and attracts both Italian and foreign filmmakerss as well as Hollywood stars. The Capri Art Film Festival, an annual event, was also started in 2006.
The early 2000s saw the addition of two tourist destinations: In the Northeast, Villa Lysis, which had been derelict for decades, was meticulously restored to serve as a cultural center and museum; in the Southwest near the Southern coast, Capri Philosophical Park opened, showcasing quotes by 60 different Western philosophers.
Read more about this topic: History Of Capri
Famous quotes containing the word centuries:
“... when I awake in the middle of the night, since I knew not where I was, I did not even know at first who I was; I only had in the first simplicity the feeling of existing as it must quiver in an animal.... I spent one second above the centuries of civilization, and the confused glimpse of the gas lamps, then of the shirts with turned-down collars, recomposed, little by little, the original lines of my self.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)