Axel Munthe and The Story of San Michele

He loved birds, flowers, and especially dogs, which he thought were easier to understand and to love than men. He travelled widely, from Lapland in his native Sweden to Italy, where he built the villa of San Michele at Anacapri on the ruins of Tiberius's palace. In Naples he witnessed the dying gathered in heaps and thrown into cholera mass graves dead or alive. In Messina he saw people crushed to death during a …