The story of Axel Munthe

Robert Allan comments that ‘the true sequence of [Axel Munthe's] life is unravell[ing] and it becomes evident that many events are either imagined or at least embroidered’, but surely this was already evident to the averagely intelligent reader from Munthe's own text even before the research by Alex Paton and Bengt Jangfeldt (Clin Med June 2009 pp 204–5). Munthe even asks the reader's forbearance for having perhaps described the man he would have liked to have been, rather than the man he actually was. The following examples drawn from the 1932 impression of The story of San Michele confirm that Munthe never intended us to take him too seriously¹:

I am aware that some of the scenes in this book are laid on the dangerous borderland between the real and the unreal, the dangerous No Man's Land between fact and fancy … I do not ask for better than not to be believed.

Pre-preface, ‘To those who have read this book’, p xiii

But I could see quite distinctly a little man as big as the palm of my hand sitting cross-legged on the table carefully pulling at my watch chain and bending his grey old beard on one side to listen to the ticking of my repeater.

Chapter VII, ‘The tallow candle and the goblin’, p 139

‘[Axel Munthe] was an unbeliever’, St Ignatius went on. ‘A blasphemous scoffer, a liar, an impostor, an enchanter full of black magic, a fornicator …’. ‘He was fond of children’, said St John. ‘He was fond of their mothers too’, growled a Patriarch in his beard.

Chapter XXXII(b), ‘In the old tower’, p 515

Unless they believed that Munthe really did spend an evening in the company of a goblin, it is hard to understand the sense of betrayal felt by some readers on subsequently discovering that Villa San Michele was designed by an architect or that the Sphinx was bought in an antique shop, rather than dug up from Nero's villa under supernatural guidance. Weaving fact and fiction beautifully together, Munthe told a story that still remains particularly inspirational to those of us in the medical profession.

However, his greatest legacy may be in the area of wildlife conservation, eg Chapter VII ‘The bird sanctuary. The wings of the angels’, p 448:

The mountain of Barbarossa is now a bird sanctuary. Thousands of tired birds of passage are resting on its slopes every spring and autumns, safe from man and beast.

Several years ago, I chanced upon a copy of an Italian weekly magazine from around 1948 containing a short article describing how, despite sharing his Royal Palace, Munthe stopped speaking with King Gustav V for a period each year corresponding to the Swedish hunting season (of which the King was an enthusiastic participant). As someone who has visited Italy almost every year since I was born, I have been struck by the year-on-year increase in birdsong (and the correspondingly reduced biting insect life) in both countryside and city, as the Italians gradually wean themselves off blasting everything that flies out of the sky.