Exiled for mocking Mussolini’s neckties, Curzio Malaparte was both an audacious provocateur and avant-garde furniture designer

In the spring of 1942, Field Marshal Rommel paid an unscheduled visit to Curzio Malaparte’s house on Capri. Perched on a crag overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, the house had acquired a reputation for its Modernist architecture and Rommel asked the Italian writer to show him around. As he was leaving, the general enquired whether Malaparte had bought the house or designed it himself. Malaparte replied that he had bought the house, adding with a sweeping gesture: “I designed the scenery.”

As with many stories told by this great self-mythologiser, the truth of this encounter is hard to establish. But his retort to Rommel was certainly a lie. Malaparte had built the house five years earlier and – after sacking the Fascist architect off the job – designed every detail himself, down to the furniture.

Copies of three key pieces of that furniture – a simple bench, table and console with carved walnut tops supported on classical columns – are currently on show at Gagosian Davies Street in London’s Mayfair (until 19 September). The reproductions were the idea of the author’s great-nephew, Tommaso Rositani Suckert, who is keen to revive his great-uncle’s reputation – a reputation that yo-yoed during Malaparte’s lifetime and headed downhill after his death. But the re-issue in English of his two semi-fictionalised autobiographical novels, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949), has recently prompted a reassessment.