Among the many beguiling locations on the island of Capri, the Villa San Michele vibrates with a particularly fantastical sense of history. At the turn of the last century, the Swedish doctor Axel Munthe constructed the villa upon the ruins of a palace from the time of the Roman emperor Tiberius, and the artifacts abandoned there in the first century A.D. became the enduring antiquarian ornaments of the doctor’s residence, where Latin stone plaques, marble corkscrew columns, and statues, missing their noses or other extremities, alternate with Roman copies and medieval relics throughout the property. In 1929, Munthe wrote “The Story of San Michele,” a best-selling memoir translated into more than 40 languages that included run-ins with ghosts and guiding voices as he pursued his dream of the villa.

Following Munthe’s death in 1949, the villa was transformed into a tiny Swedish consulate and a cultural institute hosting the country’s artists, including, most recently, the Stockholm-born, Rome-based artist and illustrator Liselotte Watkins. Entitled “Sbiadito,” or sun-faded, like the timeworn statuary of the villa’s loggia that houses her works, her show features a series of Watkins’s vases, reclaimed from flea markets and painted with her signature Cubist women in a pastel palette. A collaborator with Prada, Marimekko, Bitossi and others, Watkins decided to celebrate this personal collection with an intimate meal in the villa’s wisteria-trellised colonnade.

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