Villa San Michele, Historic house museum in Anacapri, Italy.
Villa San Michele is a historic house museum in Anacapri on the island of Capri, built across several terraces above the sea. The neoclassical structure includes a covered walkway with planted pergolas, a small round pavilion at the highest point, and halls displaying ancient finds from Roman and Egyptian excavations.
Swedish doctor and writer Axel Munthe began building his residence in the late 1890s on the foundations of a medieval chapel dedicated to the Archangel Michael. Over the following decades, he expanded the property continuously and filled the rooms with antiquities he acquired during his travels through Italy and the Mediterranean.
Visitors can walk through rooms filled with Roman and Etruscan sculptures, marble busts, and fragments of ancient friezes displayed alongside 19th-century furniture. The sphinx on the parapet has become a popular meeting spot where people pause to admire the panoramic view of the gulf below.
Access is through a steep path from the main road, which may be challenging for visitors with limited mobility. The upper terraces offer shaded areas to rest, and visiting during the cooler morning hours or late afternoon is more comfortable.
The garden shelters about 60 bird species that rest here during their spring and autumn migrations between Europe and Africa. Munthe himself set up a small refuge for exhausted migratory birds at this site, which still functions as an informal sanctuary today.
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