"Malaparte: A House Like Me" (Limited Edition) offers an extraordinary look at Malaparte, the man and the house. Often called the most beautiful house in the world, Casa Malaparte in Capri, Italy, is dramatically sited on a promontory overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. It was home to Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957), the Italian writer who designed the building. A perpetual enigma, he still confounds nearly all who care to look. Actor, novelist, poet, filmmaker, soldier, playwright, journalist, political figure, prisoner, composer, charmer - inventor and revealer of truths - Malaparte associated with Mussolini and Stalin, vilified Hitler, and admired Mao. He was a journalist in London, a collaborator with the Surrealists in Paris, and a war correspondent in Berlin and on the Russian front. "Casa come me," he called the building - "house like me" - inviting endless speculation as to what meaning lay within.
Much as Picasso, Breton, Pound, Eliot and Godard discovered the house and its legendary owner earlier in the century, such international personalities as Robert Venturi, Emilio Ambasz, Willem Dafoe, Steven Holl, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Arata Isozaki, Louis Cha, Carla Fendi, James Wines, and Karl Lagerfeld have created this special portfolio embodying unique insights into the controversial artist and his provocative home.
A work of art in itself, "Malaparte: A House Like Me" includes a series of photographs produced especially by the renowned Italian photographer Mimmo Jodice, archival materials and documents, poetry, original art, letters, memoirs, commentaries, and an original musical score. Organized and edited by noted architect, designer, and writer Michael McDonough, this remarkable book ultimately celebrates Casa Malaparte's enigmatic contradictions, seeing it as a "living literary work, an autobiography, and a mysterious tabula rasa: a
house that lives in myth.
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