Maybe it’s better to start the visit at the end. In a way, by its highlight: this red granite Sphinx, which looks out over the Bay of Naples from its promontory at the very end of the course of Villa San Michele, on the heights of the north coast of Capri. It would have been carved in Egypt more than three millennia ago. Nobody knows how he got there. A mystery that counts for little as we quickly get carried away by the show.
From right to left the Sorrento peninsula, Pompeii and Vesuvius, then Naples and finally the islands of Procida and Ischia. And blue, that of the sea and that of the sky, which come together and give the impression that the earth is floating. “I want my house to be like a Greek temple, open to the wind, the sun and the voices of the sea… Light, light, light everywhere,” wrote Axel Munthe (1857-1949), Swedish physician and writer, former owner of the site who bequeathed the property to his country.
It’s hard not to be amazed
This view is now open to everyone. In 2019, the last “normal” tourism year, 126,000 visitors discovered Villa San Michele, the island’s second attraction after the Blue Grotto, a geological marvel that makes the water shimmer a fluorescent azure under the sun’s rays. It is a villa full of antique objects, authentic or copied: sculptures, busts, bas-reliefs, sarcophagi, amphorae. We enter a plain white house. An inner courtyard offers freshness. Then, via a pergola, we reach the garden, which houses antiques. And then the Sphinx and the chapel and the view. It’s hard not to be amazed, even if you’re rarely alone in high season.
“Everything sparkled and glittered in the sun and everything was made of marble and rare gold and stone. Rainer Maria Rilke
During Axel Munthe’s lifetime, the villa was a paradise with more restricted access. The doctor was the personal physician of Queen Victoria, whom he recommended on an excellent prescription to spend the winters on Capri to cure her chronic bronchitis. She dedicated her evenings there to playing the piano or stroking her host’s dogs, in a pre-dolce vita that was offered to the supposedly great of this world. But the villa was not reserved for crowned heads, it was a place of exile, of intellectual rest, for writers.
View of the Bay of Capri from Villa San Michele. PAOLO DI LUCENTE FOR M LE MAGAZINE DU MONDE
Henry James walked along the paths of the lemon trees. Evicted from the luxurious Quisisana residence in the center of the island because their love was considered scrappy, Oscar Wilde and his lover Alfred “Bosie” Douglas took refuge there. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who spent a few months on Capri in the winter of 1906 and spring of 1907 and was a little bored in the holiday resorts of the powerful, also came for a walk to San Michele. In it he wrote: “Everything sparkled and glittered in the sun and everything was marble and rare gold and stone. »
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