Italian Escapades, part 1

This story, taking place in 1920, was read by Ulla Bjerne on the Swedish language radio in Finland (YLE) in 1957. She was 67 years old, looking back at her life and she read in a colloquial manner, improvising, I should think, from a written script. (On the picture above, from 1920, she was 30 years.)

I did the transcription and translation from Swedish. I have also split the text in six parts so as not to have anybody fall asleep.

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Italian Escapades

1.

I always believed in fate and still believe everything of importance that happened to me in life was predestined.

How could I expect that, when on New Year's Day 1920 I broke up from a stay of many years in Copenhagen och went to Italy, Destiny awaited me there. Please don't believe that it was in a banale way in the shape of some kind of Italian man popping up. No, it was all much more artful than that.

As my books sold well back then my publisher Olle Dahlberg had not been stingy but given me a check of 5 000 kronor. That was a lot of money back then, the krona was highly valued so one got 25 lire for five kronor. I remember it because all summer long I stayed at one of Capri's most distinguished hotels, La Palma, and paid five kronor for a full board. But first and foremost I was, naturally, in Italy to experience Rome, so upon arrival I rented a room in a private villa on Via Cristina, close to Piazza del Popolo on Monte Pincio.

Since I hadn't come to Italy as a tourist but to stay as long as possible I didn't tire myself with unnecessary visits to all kinds of museums, nor did I look at too many ruins. I let everything come to me in due time and as it happened. The main thing for me was to get started right away with my new life in Italy and experience its people. And I knew the language well enough after having taking Italian classes, so I managed, if poorly, to begin with.

Already on the train to Milan I met some young Italian officers who belonged to the Queen's regiment in Rome. They recommended their own restaurant on the via Nazionale. To get a cotoletta alla milanese or a spaghetti I would every day walk through the most busy streets of Rome. The traffic, compared to the noise and roaring lambrettas of today, seemed almost peaceful.

Among the officers there were cheerful and handsome fellows attired in light blue romantic uniforms and gold braid hats. As the only woman in the group I was properly appreciated but I soon learned that as a female type they didn't understand me at all.

When one of them on a daily basis started harassing me with rather base declarations of love I refrained from joining the circle of light blue cloaks and instead I met some Swedish painters who had come to Rome. They were Leander Engström, Einar Jolin and Ewald Dahlskog.

Also, Frank Heller hade found his way to Rome and he was falling in love with Danish Annie Krogh whom he later married. Incessantly, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes arrived who once a week met at the Circolo Scandinavo where they would chat and drink wine.

For a Scandinavian, the warm sunny Roman spring with a profusion of flowers and blue Chinese wistaria clinging over ancient front doors and garden walls was a seductive experience.

We would make excursions to Tivoli and Gianicolo and stroll around the old neighborhood Trastevere with its winding narrow alleys and old dilapitated palaces and churches. However, foremost in my memory live the Sunday outings with Gladys Heyman and a bunch of Italian young artists.

Beautiful Gladys, who later married the composer Gösta Nystroem, had already since long lived in Rome and studied sculpture. Because of this she knew some Italian artists and as I had come to Italy to meet the locals and not Scandinavians I was soon made part of her gang. Besides Gladys the company consisted of seven happy Italian youngsters and one of them I remember specifically, a giant painter, a gladiator type whose name was Del Neri.

Early Sunday mornings we met and wandered out to some village on the Roman campagna, had breakfast there and dozed off during the late hours in the shade of a tree.

Our merry picnics usually ended at some small trattoria close to via Margutta where we had grilled lamb roast with a tasty and inexpensive wine.

They were very childish those Italians, keen on pranks and larks.

(To be continued)

La garçonne från Söderhamn

If the modernist movement in Sweden and Finland during the first two decades of the 20th century were a film, Ulla Bjerne would have been an extra in it. And an important one. She would appear in a good number of scenes as she seems to have known everyone who played a significant role in the arts and letters, particularly within the avantgarde. (But extra is not the right word here, extras are silent. Ulla Bjerne was never silent.)

She was good friends with, and sometimes had romantic relationships with, the following Swedish arts and letters giants. Evert Taube, Nils Dardel, GAN (Gösta Adrian-Nilsson - one of Sweden's most prolific pioneers and most sought after within the gay community; he was an expressionist, a futurist, a cubist and finally a surrealist!), Isaac Grünewald, Einar Jolin,Leander Engström, Frans G Bengtsson.

And many more, also later on in Finland.

”The life and work of Ulla Bjerne” has been my on-again off-again hobby for more than a decade.

One day I will present a film or a book about her fascinating personality. (There is manuscript but there is no time.)

I have, I believe, the largest collection of her books. (Easy, I would imagine nobody else collects them.) Rivaled only by the library in her home in Lovisa by the Gulf of Finland.

I have travelled in Ulla's footsteps in Copenhagen, Paris and elsewhere in France where she spent a good deal of the 1910's and 20's.

Also, I have visited places and people in Finland where she 1921 became Ulla (Bjerne-)Biaudet when she married the Léon Biaudet, a physician of local prominence, and came to be involved in the litterary circles of modernist Swedish-speaking Finland.