|
entry May 2009 The Trail of English forts at Anacapri Even at the height of
the
tourist season on Capri, there a few
places you can go that are so out
of the way that you really can wander for hours and scarcely pass
another
person. Obviously, the town of Capri, itself, is not one of those
places. Perhaps if you head up to the eastern height of the Villa
Jovis, you might leave the flabby hordes behind, but, alas, up there
you will run
into at least small groups of very healthy tourists barely warmed up
from the one-hour climb; they will trample you in the same fashion as
their out-of-shape
friends are trampling the beautiful flowers of the Gardens of Augustus
back in town. No, you must smite the sounding furrows and sail (or at
least take a bus) towards
the
baths of all the western stars, yea, even beyond the villa of Axel
Munthe at Anacapri (though well
worth the visit) and even past the fine
chair-lift to Monte Solaro (also worthwhile). Go through and past the
main part of the town of
Anacapri, itself, as if you were walking up the stem of a
gigantic capital
letter "Y"; at the fork, the road on the left leads to the lighthouse
at Punta
Carena, and the right leads down to the Blue Grotto. The blank triangle
in the middle is the western side of the island of Capri; that is where
you want to go, but you can't go straight at the fork; you have to go
either to the extreme left or right and then find the "trail of the
forts"
that leads across from one side to the other, along the entire western
slope of the island. If you find it, remember how to get back, because
you may very well be alone.Historical background Why
there are English forts along the western
coast of the island of Capri at all
requires a bit of an explanation. Briefly, the Bourbon dynasty was chased from its kingdom
of Naples by the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806. The Neapolitan
royals, sheltered by the British fleet, fled to Sicily. This left the
mainland in the hands of the French, first in the hands of Napoleon’s
brother, Joseph, and then of Murat,
where it remained until Napoleon's ultimate departure from the
European scene 10 years later. Smaller islands were problematical, and
for a few years the British sought to hold on to Capri by reinforcing
the island against invasion from the mainland. This entailed building a
string of fortifications. [For more on the struggle for the island, see
The Battle of Capri.] The forts Whereas
Capri was protected with continuous walls, the wide-open western
stretch of the island below the town of Anacapri was fortified by the
English with a string of blockhouses. To a certain extent, some of
these installations are on or near sites of earlier, strategically
placed “Saracen towers,” which for
centuries had provided protection against pirate raids. The trail of
forts stretches from the Blue Grotto on the leeward northern side to
the lighthouse at Punta Carena on the southern side.
The
construction of these forts entailed the destruction—or partial
destruction—of some other interesting archaeological sites, including Villa Damecuta, one of
the twelve Imperial Roman villas to be found on
the Island of Capri. The known ruins of the Villa Damecuta extend for
140 meters along a western cliff and have an area of over 1,000 sq.
meters. By way of comparison, the main block of Villa Jovis is 5,400
sq. meters (about one-third the size of the Domus Tiberiana on the
Palatinate in Rome). *note Excavations
of villa Damecuta were begun under the direction of the great
Neapolitan archaeologist, Amedeo Maiuri, the
discoverer of the grotto of the famed Sibyl
of Cuma. Villa Damecuta is reminiscent of the more famous Villa
Jovis at the extreme height of the other end of the island and appears
to have been abandoned after the great eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Also, not far from the villa is the Damecuta tower, originally a
12th-century “Saracen tower.” Restoration of the “Trail of forts” was begun in 1998, partially funded by the European Union. When you say “twelve imperial villas” of Capri, you mean villas belonging to Tiberius or Augustus or members of their aristocratic extended families. There is some uncertainty as to the number; Houston (bibliography) views with skepticism the earlier claims of Beloch (bibliography) that they were pretty much known and catalogued by the date of Beloch’s book. In any event, at least two others, besides the villas Damecuta and Jovis are: (1)
the Palazzo a mare, occupying
a stretch of some 600 meters along the
sea immediately to the west of today’s main harbor (the right, as you
enter the harbor); it, too, underwent military transformation under the
French in the early 1800s. The original layout is no longer evident,
and from above (say, the Anacapri road), the area appears to be
residential with a prominent football field in the middle of it all); (2) the Villa of Gradola, immediately above the Grotta Azzurra. The buildings are strung out across the villa’s terraces in a panoramic position along the slope and had a stairway leading down to the grotto. It was excavated in the 19th century by the eccentric American Colonel John Clay MacKowen. He found capitals, fragments of statues, columns, and flooring, some of which he moved to his Casa Rossa in Anacapri, a current tourist attraction.
Beloch,
Julius. Campanien. Geschichte und
Topographie des antiken Neapel under seiner Umgebung. Pub.
Morgenstern. Breslau. 1890. Maiuri,
Amedeo. Capri. Storia e monumenti.
Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, Rome.
1957.
|
