Manifesto for the beauty of Capri

In Naples I found the book ”Capri Futurista” with this manifesto, written by Italo Tavolato. The manifesto was presented at Il Convegno del Paessagio (The landscape meeting) on Capri in 1922, when building traditions and architecture on the island were discussed.

After this convention it was decided that the traditional ways of building were to remain on the island. The Futurist ways were not approved.

The manifesto doesn't appear particularly futurist in its defending ”of our ancient tradition” ”against the insults of materialistic modernity”. I could use some expert knowledge on this. Anyone..?

Now I would like to know how Tavolato presented his text. Sometimes the futurists would present their arguments in theatrical form.

(I would also like to know more about Tavolato's relation to Ulla Bjerne and what happened when they met on Capri in 1920. I just received a big letter from Åbo Akademi with copies of his letters to her! More soon.)

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MANIFESTO FOR THE BEAUTY OF CAPRI

(Translation from Italian by Johan Kilander)

With graceful easiness, the island rises out of the ancient sea, reaching with agitated plastic forces for the confidential proximities of the sun. Formed out of the poetics of dreams, Capri stages silently on the halcyonic Tyrrhenian. Beauty is the prize of its perfection: on its serene shores birth is given over and over again to the myth of the sun, the pagan soul, the idea of the south.

As love and art, so beauty is sacred while it illuminates the essence of things. In other places, in countries desolated and without grace, the creative forces of nature display themselves in titanic violence or in barbaric individualistic shivers of forms. In the land of the Sirens, though, the formations truthfully portray the essential images and harmonies established by the creator, far away from the transitional, accidental and imperfect, realisations. Here nature doesn’t involve in experiments, but it reveals to us the completed work, the Opus Dei. Favoured by the principle of ingenuous limitation of initiative, the beauty of the south concentrates itself in some typical motives, hence, for instance, the hill of Tuoro replicates the formal aspects of Vesuvio, the mount Solaro those of mount Pellegrino in Palermo, the Faraglioni at Capri the Sicilian Faraglioni. The conformity and the concordance of forms generate a perfect harmony where the occasional particularity serves the dominant effect of the whole.

[…]

The musical harmony of nature’s formations induces serenity in the spirit of the meridional people. Of the same divine substance are both man and things made. Under the meridional sun, all nature’s creations, men and stones and works, share the same somatic sense.

In the architecture of the villages of the island, the thought of the archaic giant Thales, to whom even the stone were alive, becomes visible. Pondering in the dream, although manifest, are these cubic houses, inserted in the sweet movement of vale and hill. Those grew, concrete and together, as the likes of vegetal creations. As the Doric column expresses to perfection the proportions of the human body, these huts turn into organic structures and body parts. Here even architecture has corporality, and it’s a genuine manifestation of the sense of vitality.

With harmony of the substances achieved the senses make themselves organs of the thought: the meridional beauty gives us access to the sensual knowledge of the spirit.

Today more then ever, it’s all about defending this beauty, the core of our ancient tradition and that which makes us susceptible to humanitas, against the insults of materialistic modernity, mechanical and industrial.