Italian
Thursday, March 27 at 6:00 PM, in the auditorium of Palazzo Bomben in Treviso, a new event is scheduled as part of the series of meetings “Architecture for Everyone. The most famous houses in the world,” a new showcase for architecture, which each year will focus on a specific category of buildings, organized by the Benetton Foundation for Studies and Research, curated by J.K. Mauro Pierconti, architectural historian and curator of the exhibition space at Ca’ Scarpa.
TREVISO. In this second appointment of the cycle dedicated to presenting some of the most famous and stimulating houses in the history of architecture, J.K. Mauro Pierconti will tell the story of Casa Malaparte (1938-1942) in Capri, often referred to as one of the most important and representative works of contemporary architecture.
Built on a rocky spur, Punta Massullo, difficult to reach by land, Casa Malaparte is characterized by a long staircase that climbs up the back of the house and leads to a terrace that literally plunges into the sea.
Architecture made from simple materials, constantly struck by the sun and caressed by perpetual winds, revives in itself some features of Mediterranean houses; and never as in this case has the construction been the successful result of two equally important figures: the architect, Adalberto Libera, and the client, the writer Curzio Malaparte.
Malaparte described the chosen site for the House as follows: “there was in Capri, in the wildest, most solitary, most dramatic part, in that part all turned towards the south and the east, where the island from human becomes fierce, where nature expresses itself with an incomparable and cruel force, a promontory of extraordinary purity of lines, jutting out into the sea like a rocky claw”.
In 1963, the French director Jean-Luc Godard set the scenes of the film Contempt, based on the novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia, right in this house and in the spectacular natural setting that surrounds it. The movie tells the story of a love that gradually turns into the bitter feeling of contempt, leading to the end of the relationship between the two lovers portrayed by Michel Piccoli and a young Brigitte Bardot.
