24/09/2004 - Num. 22 2004

A century of service

For a hundred years, the red cars of the funicular have been bringing people to the very heart of island life in just a few minutes

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by Claudio Angelini

There are those who doggedly prefer the Maremmo-chic lure of southern Tuscany or the faded exoticism of the Caribbean or the Seychelles. And yet, the island of Capri is still the queen of the sea for those who have delighted in it – especially in its lull season, the period favoured by its residents in exile, such as Baron Fersen, Norman Douglas and Compton Mackenzie. It is hard to list all the gems of this small land so dear to the dandies of every era. There are the Faraglioni, the Blue Grotto, the Natural Arch, and an infinite number of coves, spots, and walks where one feels the presence of the god who created all this beauty with the help of the wind, the rocks and the sea. But there is also something created by man. And we don’t mean the small villas that appear every winter, pushing their way onto the island. We mean the funicular railway, which is now a century-old symbol of the island. Admittedly it was not welcomed with honours or the grumbling that greeted the funicular on Vesuvius on 6 May 1880, which was first seen as “a profanation… that deprives the mountain of its poetry”, only to have songs and poems dedicated to it later. In fact, when musician Luigi Cenza and lyricist Peppino Turco saw the first two cars climb so laboriously up the volcano, they composed Funiculì, funiculà, creating one of the musical legends of Naples, which was even slightly plagiarized by Richard Strauss.
Indeed, Capri’s funicular started operating in 1905 virtually unnoticed, so much so that it was not officially inaugurated until two years later. It was not just something that tourists needed or the islanders demanded – who were tired of going from Marina Grande to the town of Capri on foot or the back of a donkey while holiday-makers enjoyed the ride in elegant carriages. So in 1892, an organizing committee was set up, and in a relatively short time – at least for those times – the cable railway was completed by SIPPIC (Consortium of Public and Private Enterprises on Ischia and Capri), an Italo-American company founded for that purpose, and operated every half hour during the day. The railway soon worked a kind of social miracle: inside its cabins, islanders and outsiders began to fraternize and to get to know each other. There were two other minor miracles as well, one regarding energy, the other education. Thanks to an independent energy plant, the electricity that ran the funicular spread rapidly throughout the island, illuminating hotels and private homes, where gas lamps and candles were put aside. In the name of progress, a parish priest, Don Giuseppe De Nardis, invited the Sisters of Saint Elizabeth to Capri, who set about teaching young and old to read, write and speak a slightly less obscure dialect. Tourism grew, as did wealth, making Capri the most sought-after island in the Gulf of Naples. Meanwhile, at the end of the 1800s, three Englishmen arrived, each on his own but each fleeing the hostile atmosphere created in England when Oscar Wilde was convicted of homosexuality. Those three were none other than William Somerset Maugham, Edward Frederick Benson and John Ellingham Brooks.
Later Wilde’s friend Lord Alfred Douglas arrived, joined by Wilde himself in 1897 on his release from prison. Capri turned into a haven of pleasure where nothing was considered sinful. Private clubs sprang up along with “clans” of British, German and French exiles, who isolated the island increasingly from the mainland. Then in 1898 the arms manufacturer Fritz Krupp arrived, but not looking for war. On the contrary, he organized orgies and wild parties that the islanders did not dare condemn because the industrialist was extremely wealthy and generous. He distributed money to one and all and paid for the construction of a magnificent road. Yet when the gossip became full-fledged news, Germany went into an uproar and condemned Krupp, driving him to abandon Capri and commit suicide. By this time, the island had become a veritable crossroads of sinners. Baron Fersen, for one, the subject of Peyrefitte’s novel L’esule di Capri, built a sumptuous but accursed villa. He too committed suicide (by taking five grams of cocaine) after a dissolute, much-talkedabout life. His aesthetic suicide absolved the island of its “otherness”, elevating it to a kind of Olympus where any and everything was allowed – do not the gods themselves sin in order to pardon humanity with greater ease!
Meanwhile, the funicular counted typical middleclass families among its passengers. Today Capri is no longer the island of transgression; it is an island of children, a fashionable, regular haunt, where the sound of babies crying is louder than that of the crashing waves. Or the clatter of the “funiculì-funiculà”. Which reminds me, it is especially lovely to ride the funicular when it rains, because rain is the real test on Capri. Like a beautiful woman struck by an unexpected ailment, the island shows its true beauty – not the immature charm of a young girl – when the weather suddenly breaks. And as the rain fades away, the sky lights up with bursts of sunlight like the flashing eyes of a siren – a siren made of limestone and sandstone “anchored” seventeen miles off Naples and just a few moments away from the Roman Empire. Seen from the funicular, Capri is truly more beautiful, the island of islands, in fact.