Born January 31, 1893, Paris, France
Died May 9, 1993, Asolo, Italy
Born in Paris in 1893, Freya Stark seemed destined for a life of travel right from the start. Her parents were wealthy painters who moved freely about Europe, and some of Stark’s earliest memories were of foreign landscapes rolling by her train window. Her father was English and her mother, who was of English and Italian heritage, had grown up in Italy. Stark’s childhood was split between the English countryside and Italy’s mountainous Piedmont region.
Stark’s parents divorced when she was ten and her father eventually bought land in British Columbia, Canada, and settled there. He gave Freya and her younger sister a large sum of money before he left. In 1912 Stark used some of that money to study history at the University of London. It was the first formal schooling she had ever received. (Governesses had taught her as she had traveled from place to place.) Before she could earn her degree, though, World War I (1914–1918) broke out, and she returned to Italy, concerned for her mother’s safety.
Stark served as a nurse in Italy during the war. At one point, she contracted typhoid and nearly died.
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