One of the prominent tourist attractions on the island of Capri is the Casa rossa (Red house) in the town of Anacapri. It is more than red; it is Pompeian red and stands out prominently on the main pedestrian thoroughfare in Anacapri. It is a glaring architectural hodge-podge of pseudo-Norman/Arab mullioned windows, a porticoed courtyard, a non-watchtower and some swell leftover crenels and merlons. It would be at home in Las Vegas. It is—at least in intent— perhaps similar to the nearby villa of Axel Munthe; that is, it is what you might expect of someone from abroad who falls in love with the island and its classical heritage and sets out to buy as much of it as he can and build a house in which to display it all. That someone was John Clay MacKowen. Documentation at the Casa Rossa calls him a “U.S. general.” He was actually a colonel in the forces of the Confederate States of America, small details that may be insignificant to those in Anacapri.

MacKowen (1842-1901) was one of the children of John McKowen [variant spellings are accurate—the son spelled his surname differently from the rest of the family], an 1830 immigrant to Louisiana from Castle Dawson, Ireland. John Clay MacKowen served as a Confederate lieutenant colonel in the 15th Louisiana Cavalry Regiment in the US civil war. His brother, Alexander, was killed at the battle of Vicksburg.

MacKowen graduated from Dartmouth College in 1866, became a doctor and practiced medicine in Jackson, Louisiana where he was appointed to the board of administrators of the insane asylum. He also studied the causes of yellow fever and contributed greatly to the battle against that disease in Louisiana.

Beginning in the 1870s, MacKowen spent much of his time in Anacapri on the island of Capri. He bought a number of properties including the Blue Grotto and the adjacent Roman imperial villa of Gradola. (It sounds like a joke. I, myself, once bought the Colosseum in Rome from a friendly guide, but.... In the days before mass tourism, places such as Capri were hard-scrabble farming communities always strapped for money. Maybe you really could just walk up and ask, “Say, how much y'all want for that Blue Grotto over there; oh, and I’ll take one o’ them Roman villas, too!”) Many of the classical fragments that MacKowen found in that area he then moved to the Casa rossa, the home he had built for himself in the town of Anacapri where they are today part of the classical items on display. He was also an avid collector of rare books and manuscripts and travelled widely in Europe, Africa, and Asia. He lived in Anacapri until 1899 and then returned to Louisiana where he died in 1901.

Besides the classical items on display within the Red House, there is an art collection on permanent display entitled “The Painted Isle,” a collection of 32 canvases from the 1800s and 1900s dedicated to the island of Capri.