Walking towards Casa Malaparte

The walkway to Casa Malaparte, passing Grotta di Matermània. How close would we be able to get?

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.

Döderhamn

When Ulla Bjerne died in 1969, her and Léon's home (link in Swedish only) in Lovisa was donated to the Society of Swedish Authors in Finland (Finlands svenska författareförening). Finnish authors or poets who write in Swedish can apply for a grant to stay there with no rent for three years.

On the picture above from 1940 Ulla is standing in her and Léon's home next to a 1918 painting by Einar Jolin. The legendary Danish silent movies actor Nils Asther is knealing at her feet so it's probably painted in Copenhagen. Ulla smokes the pipe like in many other pictures of her.

At Åbo Akademi in Turku (Finland) I have gone through Ulla Bjerne's archives of letters and manuscripts on several occasions, always kindly assisted by the people working there. The collection has been a treasure for me, offering new directions in my research, for instance leading me to Capri to learn more about Ulla's visits here, specifically about her friendship with the Italian author Italo Tavolato, who I just recently learned was part of the Futurist movement.

Oh, and I've been to Söderhamn a number of times. That's where we have our common roots, where my grand grandfather and Ulla's father, who were brothers, lived.

Söderhamn is also where Ulla grew up. She called the small town Döderhamn (pun in Swedish; Söderhamn means ”South harbor” but if you change to Döderhamn the name becomes ”Death harbor”).

La garçonne från Söderhamn

If the modernist movement in Sweden and Finland during the first two decades of the 20th century were a film, Ulla Bjerne would have been an extra in it. And an important one. She would appear in a good number of scenes as she seems to have known everyone who played a significant role in the arts and letters, particularly within the avantgarde. (But extra is not the right word here, extras are silent. Ulla Bjerne was never silent.)

She was good friends with, and sometimes had romantic relationships with, the following Swedish arts and letters giants. Evert Taube, Nils Dardel, GAN (Gösta Adrian-Nilsson - one of Sweden's most prolific pioneers and most sought after within the gay community; he was an expressionist, a futurist, a cubist and finally a surrealist!), Isaac Grünewald, Einar Jolin,Leander Engström, Frans G Bengtsson.

And many more, also later on in Finland.

”The life and work of Ulla Bjerne” has been my on-again off-again hobby for more than a decade.

One day I will present a film or a book about her fascinating personality. (There is manuscript but there is no time.)

I have, I believe, the largest collection of her books. (Easy, I would imagine nobody else collects them.) Rivaled only by the library in her home in Lovisa by the Gulf of Finland.

I have travelled in Ulla's footsteps in Copenhagen, Paris and elsewhere in France where she spent a good deal of the 1910's and 20's.

Also, I have visited places and people in Finland where she 1921 became Ulla (Bjerne-)Biaudet when she married the Léon Biaudet, a physician of local prominence, and came to be involved in the litterary circles of modernist Swedish-speaking Finland.

Arco Naturale

Thursday bride

This is what was left after yesterday's Capri town bride showed up in an alley, right next to where Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Lenin planned the Russian revolution back in the first decade of the 1900's.

The bride was greeted by her friends and family who all threw sugar-coated almonds, rice and, as it appears, plates at her.

I heard the plate break but it was too crowded to see anything. I'm not sure breaking of plates is part of the tradition?

The almonds looked kind of yummy but I couldn't pick them up could I?

Linguistici

I sometimes think Italian sounds like the ee-language.

Let me try to explain, however I'm not sure this translates.

In Swedish, ”the ee-language” (i-språket, link in Swedish only), is a sort of language game, a play with words. Every vowel in every word is replaced by the letter i, in Swedish always pronounced ”ee”.

If Eey treeyd tee eempleey this reele in English it widd be keempletely inceempreheensible.

?

It's hard, maybe not possible to do this in a language like English with lots of diphthongs. I believe most languages have diphthongs, Swedish has none (almost).

I saw a sign today in Capri town, it said ”Intimissimi” (a boutique for underwear, ”the most intimate”).

Also the headline above, Linguistici (=”linguistically” in plural) sound like the ee-language (even though, ok all linguists reading this, there is a diphthong in gui).

Another example, instructions on our toiletseat: ”non gettare gli absorbenti igienici nei W.C.”.

I love that word, igienici. It's completely ee-language.

The other night we were invited, like all guests at the Villa San Michele, to join the director Peter Cottino to the regular Wednesday meeting, where new guests are introduced to the ways of this impressive institution, the San Michele Foundation.

If you're a newcomer, you are to present yourself in a few words.

At situations like this, when you're new and uncertain how things work, who isn't a little bit nervous? I couldn't help but toy with the idea of introducing myself in the ee-language.

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Sorry, in Swedish only:

Hij, jig hitir Lirs Fihri ich jig ir grifisk firmgiviri ich liriri pi Bickmins Disignhigskili. Jig irbitir mid in idig ginski birtglimd firfittiri, Illi Bjirni sim livdi millin 1890 ich 1969.”

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It may not surprise you that I didn't. (I think that had I done it, it would possibly have amused Ulla Bjerne, who was a bit of a prankster.)

Every Wednesday one guest has offered to present his or her work. This time, Anders Fahlbeck, a former assistent to Josef Oliv's, a legendary director of the institution, talked about his research on guests at the villa during the 1950's and 60's.

It was a very interesting talk and afterwards some of us had dinner at da Gemma, an institution in itself in Capri town.

Beautiful detail, Anders met his wife Åsa, also present, on Capri 1960, when she was working at the Swedish solar station then run by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.