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 most interesting blockhouses are those at Orrico,
Campetiello (also called di Mesola) and Pino. Although
they were originally built by the English in 1806, they
were then enlarged by the French after they took Capri at
Orrico (top photo) on October 4th 1808. There is an
additional small blockhouse called il cannone (the
cannon) facing Tombosiello creek (photo, left). These
small forts plus a few towers along the stretch
constituted the western defensive system for
Anacapri.
As with almost every
other historical site in the Bay of Naples, these forts
have legend connected to them. The fort at Orrico, for
example, is said to be where the island's first Greek
inhabitants, the "Teleboi", disembarked from Epirus. There
is, in fact, a convenient landing stage near the fort; it
is from here that the Aragonese
(who took the island from the Angevins
in the 1400s) and then the English and French attacked and
conquered the island.
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. The villa was excavated in the 19th century by the eccentric American Confederate 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.
[Also see, Letter from
Anacapri 2011-On the Trail of the Tiny Forts]
Bibliography:
-Beloch, Julius.
Campanien. Geschichte
und Topographie des antiken Neapel under seiner
Umgebung. Pub. Morgenstern. Breslau. 1890.
-D’Arms, J.H. Romans
on the Bay of Naples. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, MA. 1970
-Houston, George W. “Tiberius on Capri” in Greece & Rome,
Second Series, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Oct., 1985), pp. 179-196.
Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical
Association.
-Maiuri, Amedeo. Capri.
Storia e monumenti. Istituto Poligrafico dello
Stato, Rome. 1957.