Casa Malaparte and the UFOs

The other day, I mentioned that a few years ago I read two books by Curzio Malaparte—as much as for his literature, Malaparte is famous for his home, Casa Malaparte. The house is near Capri and looks onto the Gulf of Salerno; famously, it featured in the Godard film Les Mépris (Contempt; 1963). The house was designed by Malaparte and Adalberto Libera—and Malaparte made the specific request that the stairs on the house be a “stairway to infinity”.

In 1954, an artist, Raffael Castelle, reported that he saw a large illuminated disc land at Casa Malaparte—at first he thought it was a helicopter, but he was soon proved quite wrong. Four men emerged, sometimes described as “dwarves”, and stayed there for half an hour—bluish lightning emanated from the object. At around the same time, there was a “UFO flap” in France (relatively near the villa)—multiple sightings, with one poor farmer who watched an object walking into a ditch in the process.

As you can see in the title picture, Malaparte was into masks—his name itself is wordplay, his real name was the more Germanic Kurt Suckert; he changed it to “Malaparte” as a play on “Bonaparte”—“the bad part” and “the good part”; and, you could say, the Yin and the Yang—the interpenetration of opposites, the black and the white. Wordplay—essential to the Grail. Masks—initiatic, to become the god. A stairway to infinity.

It’s not hard to see what happened: the Malaparte house is not so much a summer residence as a temple—a means by which to summon the gods: the dwarves, their disc, and their bluish lightning. Malaparte, being rather Germanic, must have been Hyperborean (he did back Italian Fascism, after all)—and perhaps there was a lot more to Italian Futurism, as practiced by Libera, than just a love for technology; and perhaps that old surrealist de Chirico was more than just a peculiar artist—he really did summon other worlds.