Villa San Michele: Axel Munthe's House of Light on Capri

Most great houses are statements of power. Villa San Michele is a statement of longing. Perched above the sea at Anacapri, on the island of Capri, it was built around the turn of the twentieth century by Axel Munthe, a Swedish physician and writer, to his own design and largely with his own money and the labour of his neighbours. He wanted a house open to the sun, the wind, and the voices of the ocean, like a Greek temple, with light everywhere. He got it, and then he wrote the book that made it famous.

There is a man who wanted light, and who built a house to catch it.

Munthe bought the site in June 1895: a tiny house and vineyard purchased from a local carpenter, Vincenzo Alberino, standing on the ruins of an ancient Roman summer villa, with adjoining land and a ruined chapel. From this unpromising beginning he built the villa from scratch, working without an architect and guided by an idea rather than a plan. The result is unlike any other house in Italy: part villa, part museum, part stage set for a life lived deliberately.

The setting does half the work. The villa stands at the top of the Phoenician Steps, and its gardens look out over the harbour of Capri, the Sorrentine Peninsula, and Mount Vesuvius across the bay. But Munthe was not content with the view. He filled the gardens with Roman, Etruscan, and Egyptian antiquities, chosen for their beauty and their symbolic weight. The most famous is the red granite sphinx at the end of the sea-facing portico, more than 3,200 years old and hypothesised to have come from a temple of Isis at Benevento. The hypothesis is unproven, which somehow suits the house: at San Michele, the poetry of a thing matters as much as its provenance.

The doctor's house

Munthe was a fashionable physician whose patients included Guy de Maupassant, August Strindberg, and Queen Victoria of Sweden, and the house reflects the sensibility of a man who treated the rich and thought about the human condition. The interiors are spare by the standards of the great houses: whitewashed walls, loggias, pergolas heavy with wisteria, rooms that open to the air. The antiquities are everywhere, but they are placed like punctuation rather than displayed like trophies.

The planting is as considered as the architecture. Mediterranean species grow alongside African lilies, Caucasian pomegranates, Japanese hydrangeas, Australian myrtle, and Swedish birch, a botanical autobiography of a well-travelled Swede. It should not work, and it does, because the underlying structure is classical: terraces, pergolas, and axes that hold the exotic planting in a disciplined frame.

Guests and ghosts

The house accumulated its mythology the way its gardens accumulated antiquities: one remarkable visitor at a time. The Marchesa Luisa Casati, the most extravagant hostess of her age, lived here in 1919 and 1920, and the museum's permanent exhibition keeps her memory green. Munthe's own circle, the writers, the royalty, the fellow Scandinavians who made the pilgrimage up the Phoenician Steps, gave the house its reputation as a place where the European imagination came to look at the sea.

That reputation was sealed by the book. The Story of San Michele, published in 1929, is that rare thing: a memoir of a house that is really a memoir of a sensibility. Its worldwide success meant that for millions of readers, Villa San Michele was the first Mediterranean dream house they ever encountered, years before they could afford the journey. The house has been living up to its own legend ever since, which is a demanding way to live.

The book and the afterlife

In 1929 Munthe published The Story of San Michele, a memoir of the house and the life lived in it. It became a worldwide success, translated into dozens of languages, and it fixed the villa in the imagination as the archetype of the Mediterranean dream house: the northerner who builds his paradise in the south. Every subsequent book about escaping to Italy stands, knowingly or not, in its shadow.

Munthe donated the villa to the Swedish state around his death in 1949, and it now operates as a house-museum and a centre for artistic and humanitarian studies, supervised by the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome. The museum keeps a permanent exhibition dedicated to the Marchesa Luisa Casati, the celebrated eccentric who lived here in 1919 and 1920. The cafe, Billy's Bar, is named after Munthe's wine-loving monkey. A Swedish-Italian bird observatory operates on the estate land. The house takes its afterlife as seriously as its life.

Villa San Michele endures because it is the most personal of the great houses. There is no dynasty here, no architect showing off, no collection assembled for status. There is a man who wanted light, and who built a house to catch it. Go in the late afternoon, when the sun drops toward the sea and the sphinx throws its long shadow across the terrace. You will understand the book, and the house, in a single look.

Visiting

The villa operates as a museum under the supervision of the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome, and it is open to the public. Combine it with the walk up the Phoenician Steps from Capri town if your legs are willing; the climb is the traditional approach and the view from the top is the reward. Current hours and prices were not verified at the time of writing, so check the official site before visiting. Allow half a day, and stay for a coffee at Billy's Bar, named for the monkey.