In the Story of San Michele (Murray, 16s.) Dr. Axel
Munthe sets out to describe how he fulfilled a vow, made as a student, to possess the ruined chapel of San Michele and the garden where once had stood the imperial villa of the emperor Tiberius on the island of Capri. If the story reveals more of . Dr. Munthe than of San Michele we are at least warned in the preface, "It is not about San Michele and your precious marble fragments from the villa of Tiberius you have been writing the whole time, it is only some fragments of clay from your own broken life that you have brought to light." The book is more than a memoir or an autobiography, in fact the neat rounding off of some of the episodes smacks suspiciously of fiction. But the result is excellent and makes most enter- taining reading, in spite of a rather tiresome thread of fantasy running through the narrative. There is no lack of variety. Dr. Munthe writes about Lapp folk-lore with the same assur- ance as he does of the epidemic of cholera in Naples. Dr. Munthe is a passionate lover of animals and birds, and through his efforts a bird sanctuary has been established on Capri where hitherto thousands of migratory birds had been netted and slaughtered. In an author's note it is announced that the profits on the sale of this book will be handed to the Naples Society for the Protection of Animals.
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