0 Cop CAPRI 25 - Caesar Augustus

conobbe Mabel Norman, ricca e affascinante
pittrice americana, e se ne innamorò
perdutamente. Tanto da lasciare la moglie,
Capri e Roma e a trasferirsi con il nuovo
amore negli Stati Uniti.
Per Jenny fu un colpo durissimo. Una notte
d’inverno, sola e disperata, tentò il suicidio
gettandosi in mare. Venne salvata in
extremis quando era al limite della resistenza
e intirizzita dal freddo: morirà pochi
giorni dopo di polmonite. Villa Jenny resterà
chiusa e abbandonata per decine di
anni.
A casa in jeep
Via Camerelle visse la sua seconda fase d’oro
a cavallo della seconda guerra mondiale.
Gli americani, sbarcati in Sicilia, e arrivati
nel Golfo risalendo l’Italia, avevano fissato
il loro quartier generale a Capri nelle stanze
del Quisisana. Il loro comandante, colonnello
Woodward, aveva preso alloggio a
Punta Tragara, ma ogni giorno si faceva accompagnare
a casa in jeep sfrecciando lungo
via Camerelle. Intanto i suoi ufficiali
sciamavano per le strade alla scoperta dell’isola:
ne diventeranno i massimi sponsor in
tutto il mondo, la migliore agenzia promozionale
possibile, spot viventi pronti a
THE SECRETS
OF VIA CAMERELLE
by BRUNO MANFELLOTTO
The scene of love affairs and home
to luxury brand boutiques,
Via Camerelle is Capri’s most
famous street
That’s Capri. It offers you winding lanes that
climb steeply for kilometres, but at the end
rewards you with unforgettable vistas. It
surprises you with dusty paths in the shade of
age-old pines that suddenly open up, letting in
the dazzling sunlight. It gives you walks through
broom and prickly pears that stretch all the way
from the mountains to the sea. But there are
also more sheltered, apparently minor, streets
steeped in history, which represent an era and
are marked by the thousands of changes on an
island that constantly reinvents, yet always
remains, itself. And others that Alberto Savinio
has described as “lazy, languorous, protean. At
the most beautiful point they abandon you,
perhaps continuing farther on, at intervals, in fits
and starts. Streets with temperament, like
Hungarian violinists”.
One of these is Via Camerelle, which begins
where Corso Vittorio Emanuele reaches the
Quisisana, continues in a straight line to Via
Tragara, and meets up with three of Capri’s
most typical streets: Via Cerio leading to the
Charterhouse of San Giacomo; Via Occhio
Marino from which there are glimpses of just
one of the island’s seas between the villas; and
the “protean” steep narrow street that also joins
up with the noble Via Tragara which ends in a
terrace high above the Faraglioni, with one of
the most stunning vistas in the world.
After leaving behind the hustle and bustle of the
Corso and the toing and froing between the
Piazzetta and the Quisisana, and maybe
greeting friends sitting at the Hotel La Palma or
getting an ice-cream at Scialapopolo on the
way, we head for Via Camerelle. At the
Quisisana we turn right, taking a curious peek at
the terrace filled with tourists and bons vivants,
and slip into this charming street. The scene of
many crazy love affairs (what corner of Capri
isn’t?), it is quite mysterious. Starting with its
name: Camerelle
It was first known as this in the eighteenth
century, to indicate a stony way (which it was to
remain for the next two centuries) at the foot of
Monte Tuoro, which was bare and rocky then,
and not the riot of greenery it is today. It was not
a street at that time, but simply an embankment
that ran along the base of the road built by the
Romans to link the Castiglione to Punta
Tragara.
Like nearly all Roman roads, this one was also
a viaduct supported by powerful arches, about
forty all told, whose rigorously regimented small
bricks can still be glimpsed through the climbing
ivy and in the light from the boutiques. These
large arches were closed by the mountain
behind, thus forming small “rooms” – camarelle
or camerelle in Italian – open on one side.
In the eighteenth century, famed for its
licentiousness and excess, people were
convinced that while Imperial Rome indulged in
opulent and idle living in the villas above, the
age-old art of prostitution was practised in the
secluded camarelle below. Who knows why?
Perhaps when they read Suetonius’s biography
of the Emperor Tiberius – the island’s first major
tourist, and its most important “testimonial” in
the centuries to come – they were convinced
that the legendary sellariae – the boudoirs of
that period, or small rooms equipped for
pleasure frequented by the emperor himself –
had actually been set up in those cavernous
man-made structures.
No historian has been prepared to confirm such
a theory and some, with less imagination, see
the camarelle as large cisterns for collecting
water, which during the Roman era was a
precious resource on Capri and as muchsought-after
as sex for sale. Yet others (Edwin
Cerio, for instance), take an even more realistic
view regarding the cave-like rooms, suggesting
that the practical Romans simply ran water
conduits through the roofs of the arches. You
just go with the theory that suits you best.
The street remained cut off from the hectic life
of the island for another two centuries. It was
given a facelift and truly came alive at the
beginning of the twentieth century, when the
whole of Capri began to change due to the
thousands of tourists (there were already
40,000 in 1912) who began to make the island
their goal, attracted by the legend of the Blue
Grotto, the magnificent Faraglioni, and the
accounts and drawings by intellectuals who
took the Grand Tour.
In the beginning, the kitchens of the Quisisana –
built in 1845 by a Scottish doctor, originally
intended as a sanatorium, and converted to a
large hotel by that very same doctor 20 years
later – occupied some of the camarelle. Others
farther along became rooms of the Villa
Pompeiana, built in 1879, which is still standing
today. But the person who really changed the
street’s destiny was Gennaro Canfora, an
ingenious local craftsman. As soon as it had
been rebuilt and named Via Camerelle, he
opened the first luxury footwear shop there, slap
bang in the centre. His speciality was Capri
sandals, which were all custom-made, and cut
and sewn by hand on the spot. This was
immediately followed by a whole succession of
initiatives: shops and workshops, cafés and
restaurants. Today Via Camerelle, with its
leading fashion boutiques, the inviting Esposito
bookshop, antique shops, small hotels and
excellent restaurants, is a smaller but
equally attractive version of Via Condotti in
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