Win win

I love this image.

Can anybody, out of my thousands of followers, guess what is taking place?

(The winner gets to post a comment. Don't be rude, get in line!)

Did I tell you about all the cats around the Villa San Michele?

Axel Munthe was a well-known animal lover who saw to it that the birds on the Barbarossa mountain were protected from hunting, and whose pets lived and bred on the grounds. The cat above may well be a decendant of one of them.

Too bad I can't stand cats. Nor dogs. Munthe wouldn't have approved of that. He found it easier to communicate with animals than with people.

I will never understand animals. Maybe not people either for that matter.

Italian train abstinence

Suffering from.

Dedication

Förförare by the way comes with a dedication that has my mind spinning:

To my Danish friends,

the Actors

Albrecht and Robert Schmidt.

Who were THEY?

I definitely need to learn more about Ulla's life in Copenhagen before World War I. (She lived on this street a while. Max and/or Jennie, are you reading this?)

There are some great descriptions of those days in one of Evert Taube's first novels where the character Ella Bjerke is drawn largely from Ulla's personality.

I need to spend a month or so in wonderful Copenhagen, read Evert Taube novels and eat delicious smørrebrød.

That will happen.

Dolce far niente

Home again in Stockholm I am getting used to the overwhelming presence of ”the people of reality” (verklighetens folk).

This nation is indeed a big fat realm of reality, not always ideal for us dream...sters.

I went to Capri, l'Isola del Sogno, fearing, hoping I would dream awake every hour and not be able to work a minute.

Ulla Bjerne told me as much in the foreword to Förförare (1920):

I want to firmly dissuade anyone from going to Italy to work. During the three months I spent in Rome I made desperate attempts at putting down some of my impressions on paper. Impossible. Doing nothing was in the air. Everything was new, wonderful and soaked with sunshine.

- - -

In addition, according to Suetonius, when the emperor Augustus came to Capri he coined the name Apragopolis – specifically for Anacapri if I remember correctly – meaning city-of-do-nothings.

Well, if this was idle country it had nothing to do with me. The minute I came to the island I had lots of energy. Rarely have I felt so happy to work, writing this blog in particular.

Instead of doing sweet nothing I got even more caught up in my obsession with Ulla Bjerne, this very singular woman, who also happens to be my relative.

My age-old plans for a film or a book about Ulla have been extended. There is now a blog in continous progress. At least this one's happening and will continue to be. We'll see about the rest.

Garibaldi outfit

I found a lovely little passage in one of Ulla Bjerne's novels in the Förförare (”Seducers”) collection. The novels were written in Swedish, this one is called San Martino and it tells the story of the protagonist – in this case, as it all sounds very autobiographical I could as easily write Ulla – arriving in Naples and being recommended a visit at the Certosa di San Martino, an old and – already 1920 – dusty museum.

Not impressed by the museum she instead describes some people she observes: a threesome also on their way to San Martino. Ulla, ever intrigued by anybody who questions the norm, identifies the group as two female prostitutes and a watchmaker/traveling salesman/waiter on an outing.

The novel is no masterpiece, however, I want to translate a part of it here since it's about one of Ulla's own outfits.

Ulla Bjerne was a notorious cross dresser at a time when notoriety was well established, cross-dressing was not. During the 1910's she would live and travel around Europe wearing pantsuits and pantskirts long before those words were invented and more than a decade before la garçonne entered the fashion scene.

I have known her to systematically dress in menswear, smoke the pipe, wear a monocle and even a tophat. Here I have found a description in her own words of some of her clothing.

Before I left the museum I had a new experience. In a cabinet I discovered a torn, red shirt and a pair of very worn trousers with a hole in the behind. These garments had once clothed the grand hero of freedom Garibaldi. In my memory I made a sketch of the shirt, which I am wearing at this moment, not without success on Capri.

Again, the year was 1920. The same year, incidentally, that the picture above was taken, although I don't think it shows the Garibaldi shirt.

Oh Bologna

If only I had met you when I was young.