Evans’ Rag

Vol 2 Issue 26

Covid and the Horse You Rode in On

I’d been thinking some about another short story coming from our trip to Italy a year ago. The first short story was Saint Tropez Sketch.

The setting for this second story is the beautiful villa and strolling gardens built by a Swedish doctor on Capri overlooking the blue Mediterranean Sea.

The good doctor’s book, Story of San Michele, was a bestseller back in 1930.

“Axel Munthe grew up in Sweden. At the age of seventeen, he was on a sailing trip which included a brief visit to the Italian island of Capri. Hiking up the Phoenician steps to the village of Anacapri, Munthe came across a ruined chapel owned by a nearby resident, Maestro Vincenzo, and fantasized owning and restoring the property. The chapel, dedicated to San Michele, had been built on some of the ruins of Roman Emperor Tiberius' villa.

“Munthe went to medical school in France and then opened a medical practice in Paris. He later assisted in the 1884 cholera epidemic in Naples. In 1887, he managed to buy the ruined chapel, and subsequently spent much of his life on Capri building the Villa San Michele.”

from Wikipedia article, Story of San Michele

Name of my short story is At the Edge of an Island. First draft. I’ve posted it on Medium. It upsets Google's algorithms to place the same post more than once, so please hit the link above.

Hot of the press, er the post. Please let me know what you think.

I’m saving my pennies to go back sometime. A day trip to Capri just isn’t long enough.