AFTER VISITING ULRICHS' GRAVE in L'Aquila on April 18, 1909, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was inspired to write a short, detailed account of his experience in his book, The Homosexuality of Men and Women:
It was a happy coincidence that Ulrichs' patron in L'Aquila, the aged marquis, Dr. Niccolò Persichetti, was still living, and personally was able to show me all the quarters "the German professor" blessed with his presence. He told me about other interesting details about Ulrichs' last years. With every story, Persichetti added at the end:
"Oh, he was an extraordinary man, very respectable, admirable, but too modest. I first heard of him at the senate in Rome. The minister of education asked me, 'What kind of man is he, the one who publishes a Latin newspaper where you live in L'Aquila? Queen Margherita reads it, and she is totally charmed by it.'"
[Persichetti responded] "There must be some kind of mistake. There is no one there who could do that.
"When I returned," Ulrichs' patron continued, "I inquired at the police station, but no one knew anything about it. Someone finally said to me, 'Perhaps you mean the elderly German whom you can always see hurrying along the street, alone, with books under his arm.' I went to look him up [Persichetti showed me the old corner house] where he lived, and found him in total desperation. Just the night before, a fire in his apartment had burned all his books and papers, all his belongings. I gave him lodgings [Persichetti continued] in a house that I had inherited from my ancestors. There just happened to be an empty attic room with a splendid view of the Gran Sasso d'Italia (Great Stone Mountain).
"Look, [Persichetti led me up a dark staircase] he used to write up here; that is where his bed used to be. Over there is his desk at the window, where he could see way out into the distance. Here is where he put his flowers, which he loved so much, and over there he cooked his own meals, which certainly occurred only rarely, because he lived almost exclusively on bread, cheese, eggs, milk, and fruit, with which he occasionally took some local wine. I would like to have a plaque affixed to the house in his memory [the marquis said as we went down the stairs].
"He often came to visit us. On Sundays 'il professore' always came to eat at our family table. I always served Rhine wine at these meals. My children were always around him. You could ask him anything you wanted; he knew about everything. I have never seen such a memory or such knowledge. He knew about every coin, every little picture, every book. He especially knew how to tell a story. There was nothing foreign to him about astronomy, botany, philology, and philosophy. One time when he came to visit us, my Edoardo was brooding over some mathematical problem that he could not solve. He not only helped him to get on the right track, but at the same time also told who had first set up this problem and something about the man's personality.
"His needs were so few it was astonishing. My wife several times wanted to make a present to him of new clothes, but he constantly refused them. Besides us, he socialized only with an aged Austrian woman; otherwise there were no other Germans living here. Ever since he arrived here he never again set foot out of the place or its surroundings--the Abruzzi Mountains. He wandered a lot around the area. He much preferred the chestnut forests; they appeared to him to be a piece of the south of Germany, he told me.
"When once he failed to appear after a long time, I went up to see him. There he had been in bed for four days alone in his attic room in great pain. It was probably a bladder infection, because he was unable to pass water. I called for the doctor. He said he immediately had to go to the municipal hospital. But he did not want to part with his books and flowers. But in the end I did bring him to our hospital. When on the next day I went to visit him in his nice, clean hospital room [Persichetti showed it to me] he said to me, beaming with all his modesty, 'Oh, Marquis, I am so comfortable here. From my bed I can see your country home in the mountains, where I so often was happy with your family. And just think of my delight when yesterday evening I heard the sisters singing nearby in my beloved Latin--"Ora pro nobis" (pray for us) and "Pater noster" (Our Father), and "Ave Maria" (Hail Mary). It made me much more relaxed.'"
After Ulrichs had been in the hospital for five days, Persichetti brought him a diploma that the University of Naples had conferred on him in recognition of his Latin newspaper, Alaudae (Larks). He was even too ill to read it himself. He only smiled contentedly and died soon after in the arms of Persichetti. He still has this diploma in his safekeeping. He also possesses various Latin publications by Ulrichs, as well as his Uranian writings in the original editions; he also showed me a picture taken in his last years, a very small photograph that we looked at with a magnifying glass, an elderly, gray-bearded man with a little black cap in the circle of the Persichetti family.
"Of his anthropological studies," the marquis said, and thereby meant the homosexual question, "he spoke about them here in L'Aquila only very rarely. He devoted all his interest to the care of Latin. His newspaper had enthusiastic admirers on every continent. Besides the Queen of Italy there also was King Oscar of Sweden who subscribed. Colonel Young wrote him a letter in Latin every day from England. The people whom he fought for no longer bothered themselves about him."
That is how the aged Marquis Niccolò Persichetti concluded his statement. He had Ulrichs placed in a grave beside the Persichetti family mausoleum.
On the afternoon of that day, I made inquiries at the cemetery located about a half an hour from L'Aquila in a picturesque valley in the Abruzzi Mountains. When I asked about the grave site of Carlo Arrigo Ulrichs, the aged grounds keeper said to me that in the 14 years since his being laid to rest, I was the first person who had asked about the estranged German.
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