I recently visited a small village in the north of Italy. There are only about two hundred people living there and hunting is still cause for pride. While I was there I met a really nice Italian gentleman who’s filled his home with stacks and stacks of dead animals. Like we’ve reported before, taxidermists have a tendency to exaggerate, but this was beyond anything I’ve seen before. Mind you, it was still a beautiful house, a little bit like an Italian version of A Nightmare Before Christmas meets the YSL Christie’s auction catalogue.
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“There were no schools in my village, so I was sent to boarding school as a kid, and that’s where I grew up. I visited my parents at the weekends, and every time my father would show me a new animal that he’d stuffed. He used to play guessing games with me, asking me to name the new animals. Back at boarding school I passed the lonely weekdays by studying a picture book of birds that I got one year for Christmas. It was only one time that I failed at guessing the right name of a bird. It turned out that my father had butchered three different birds and then stitched them back together. We called it Frankenstein.”
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“I was six when I first shot a rifle. My father gave me his Flobert cal. 9, a small sparrows gun. When I killed my first prey, my father stuffed it and made a trophy to put by the others.”