One summer holiday, while rummaging through my parents’ library, I found a nice thick pocket-size book which suddenly caught my attention. The title alone had a delightful ring to it, The Story of San Michele, and it proved to be the story I kept returning to, year after year.

You might also have warm memories about the stories of Axel Munthe, le sacré suedois, psychologist, MD, humanist, animal lover, the favourite doctor of queens and Parisian hypochondriacs alike (and of their dogs, too), who built on the little isolotto di Capri, in the Naples gulf, the most admirable villa ever conceived by a non-architect, surrounded by one of Italy's most beautiful gardens.

The story went like this:

I sprang from the Sorrento sailing-boat on to the little beach. Swarms of boys were playing about among the upturned boats or bathing their shining bronze bodies in the surf, and old fishermen in red Phrygian caps sat mending their nets outside their boat-houses. Opposite the landing-place stood half-a-dozen donkeys with saddles on their backs and bunches of flowers in their bridles, and around them chattered and sang as many girls with the silver spadella stuck through their black tresses and a red handkerchief tied across their shoulders.
The little donkey who was to take me up to Capri was called Rosina, and the name of the girl was Gioia. […] In front of me danced Gioia on naked feet, a wreath of flowers round her head, like a young Bacchante, and behind me staggered old Rosina in her dainty black shoes, with bent head and drooping ears, deep in thought. I had no time to think, my head was full of rapturous wonder, my heart full of the joy of life, the world was beautiful and I was eighteen.
– 1875

*Marina Grande, where everything starts*

Trotting, just like Rosina, floppy-eared and head down, to keep the five-star hotels and the luxury shops in Capri out of sight, I trotted up on the winding road towards Anacapri, the village on top of the hill, more secluded and quiet than his posh and worldy neighbour, Capri.

Up there, perched on a rock, above the roman baths of emperor Tiberius and below San Michele's chapel, the house of Axel Munthe sunbathes gloriously, showing off the best view over the island and the golf of Napoli, alowing the naked eye to see far away, to the Sorrento coast and the crown of Vesuvius.

Villa San Michele and the Phoenician Steps, seen from Marina Grande. (Click for bird’s eye view on Google Maps) — *Villa San Michele and the Phoenician Steps, seen from Marina Grande. (Click for bird’s eye view on Google Maps*)

When he was only a young medical student, Axel Munthe happened on the island. He walked it far and wide, intoxicated with the wondrous Mediterranean spring (and don parroco's wine), and Anacapri was a whipping coup de foudre, amore la prima vista which lasted a lifetime.

First he bought a small piece of land, then a vineyard, then the old chapel, slowly building with his own two hands (and some borrowed from the local peasants) a genuine sun temple. His construction material were more often than not the history fragments he unearthed from his own garden (the island belonged at various points in time to either the Romans or the Greeks, and on that spot there used to be a villa of the Roman emperor Tiberius, who lived for 10 years in seclusion on the island): columns, bricks, parts of statues, bas reliefs, mosaics and marble.

"This is my house," I explained to them, "with huge Roman columns supporting its vaulted rooms and of course small Gothic columns in all the windows. This is the loggia with its strong arches [...]. Here comes a pergola, over a hundred columns, leading up to the chapel [...].

This is a small inner court, all white marble, a sort of atrium with a cool fountain in its midst and heads of Roman Emperors in niches round the walls. Here comes a large terrace where all you girls will dance the tarantella on summer evenings. On the top of the garden we shall blast away the rock and build a Greek theatre open on all sides to sun and wind.
This is an avenue of cypresses leading up to the chapel which we will of course rebuild as a chapel with cloister stalls and stained glass windows, I intend to make it my library.

“This is a colonnade with twisted Gothic columns surrounding the chapel and here looking out over the bay of Naples we are going to hoist an enormous Egyptian sphinx of red granite, older than Tiberius himself. It is the very place for a sphinx. I do not see for the present where I shall get it from but I am sure it will turn up in time."

It's not easy to take lightly the stroll through the villa of San Michele. The vivid memories of Munthe's stories are overwhelming; the mischiefs of Billy the baboon, the four dogs barking, the singing tortoises, the shadows of the illustrious guests who visited the good doctor – even queen Victoria of Sweden used to spend her time there, and her dogs, Tom and Fellow, are buried next to her favourite spot under the pergola:

It's not easy to travel back to the solar age of Munthe's life in the middle of the most sought-for and frequented museum on the island. You rarely find a quiet spot without polyglot enunciations, without a bunch of people perched over the rail taking in the panorama of the marina, or without an endless trail of visitors under the pergolas and on the alleys.

But stay there long enough, listening to the sea and the wind and try not to remember that Axel Munthe wrote all his memories from The Story of San Michele in the cool shadows of the medieval tower Torre di Materita, half blind and photophobic, hurt by the very sun he had craved so much and to which he had opened his solar home, too bright now for his eyes.

Walk then under the pergola, towards the 777 Phoenician steps, where you might expect to see la postina, the post woman Maria Porta-Lettere climbing bare-feet with her letters on top of the fish basket.

Look up now.

Old Pacciale, the gravedigger with nothing to do (because in Anacapri “ nobody dies as long as he keeps clear of the doctor”) is sitting on a rock smoking his broken old clay pipe and looks at the sea. You can hear the bells toll down in Capri. It is the day of San Costanzo, the patron saint of the island, about whom the Capresi say is of solid silver, but the Anacapresi know he's no match to their own San Antonio and his miracles. Gradually, you are not a visitor anymore at San Michele, the old ghosts from the eccentric autobiography come to life and you enter the story, no longer looking for Munthe, but walking in his shoes.

Spring has come once more. The air is full of it. The ginestra is in bloom, the myrtle is budding, the vines are sprouting, flowers everywhere. Roses and honeysuckle are climbing the stems of the cypresses and the columns of the pergola. Anemones, crocuses, wild hyacinths, violets, orchids, cyclamens are rising out of the sweet-scented grass. Clusters of Campanula gracilis and deep-blue Lithospermum, blue as the Blue Grotto, are springing out of the very rock. The lizards are chasing each other among the ivy. The tortoises are cantering about singing lustily to themselves—perhaps you do not know that tortoises can sing? The mongoose seems more restless than ever. The little Minerva owl flaps her wings as if she meant to fly off to look up a friend in the Roman Campagna. Barbarossa, the big Maremma dog, has vanished on errands of his own, even my rickety old Tappio looks as if he would not mind a little spree in Lapland. Billy wanders up and down under his fig-tree with a twinkle in his eye and an unmistakable air of a young man about town, up to anything. [...]
Soon the sun will sink into the sea, then comes the twilight, then comes the night. It has been a beautiful day.