July Blog

By the time you are reading this piece I should be in Tuscany to attend the wedding of my goddaughter. Just like me, she loves Italy and has through the years built up a strong relationship with the country.

My own relationship with Italy started when I was about two years old. My father who was a freshly graduated architect had been awarded a travel grant to study the Mediterranean architecture and it was de-cided that he would have the Swedish Institute in Rome as a base and my mother and I were to go with him.

My parents’ decision to take me along to post-war Italy, “where you could not even get hold of fresh milk” did not sit well with my grandparents. But my parents persisted and not only did I survive “the ordeal”, I have some of my earliest and best memories from this time.

My father was also consulted on Villa San Michele (see page 17) that the Swedish state had received as a gift from Queen Victoria's physician Axel Munthe. And that is how I got to spend part of my pre-school childhood on the island of Capri.

Among the few Swedish kids on the island were Staffan De Mistura (in this month's interview) and his brother Peter. Their mother and Italian father had come to Capri to prospect for water, a resource that would possibly be considered even more valuable than oil for an island which gets its water either through collection of rainwater or from the nearby island of Ischia from where it is transported over by boat. The Marquis De Mistura had brought drilling equipment from Alfa Laval in Sweden, but he never found any water.

In the picture above (that I got from a cousin in Sweden last year), we children are on our way to classes in the monastery right behind the main piazza in Capri that nowadays is crammed with tourists.

Staffan, who was the clever one, is wearing a black uniform with a red ribbon because he was in a higher class than me, even though I was a year older. Peter and I had white uniforms with blue ribbons and we had little pockets in the front where we could put the sugar candies that we bought from the nuns before class.

On the back of the post card that one of the rowing photographers had snapped of us, my mother writes that we had just seen a man walking around with a leopard on a leach. I still remember that, because the big cat, that did not have a muzzle, was always trying to lunge at the meat carcasses that hung outside the butcher shops.

In those days Capri was a gathering ground for everybody from Somerset Maug-ham to Esther Williams. I still remember seeing the very fat King Farouk of Egypt who had fled to Capri on his huge sailboat.

But I don't remember much from school, except that for exercise the whole class had to walk back and forth along the corridors for what seemed like hours.

Have a really nice July!

Anders