She grew up consistent with her five male brothers, playing what they played and dressing like they dressed, until she was ten years old.
When her father died, no more drums, weapons and violent games, no more masculine clothes: her mother brought her in the ordinary schemes proposing her activities which were more suitable to her status of “female”.
However, Ida only apparently agreed with the new motherly instructions and her untamed nature continuously emerged.
14 October 1809: it was the date of Ida’s twelfth birthday; in the same day, Napoleon victoriously imposed his hard requests on Austria, signing the Schonbrunn treaty. The young Ida demonstrated her disappointment turning her back when Napoleon walked. When Napoleon came back to Austria a second time, in order to avoid a further gesture like that, Ida’s mother, stopped Ida from any movement but Ida, when Napoleon passed, maintained her eyes shutted.
She read with enthusiasm any travel book, she dreamed to be the explorer of those adventures, and damned her gender because of which she could not follow those heroic examples.
After a brief and destructing love for his teacher, under suggestion of her mother she married, aged 23, a good 47 years old lawyer, who had already a son.
When the marriage failed and the children had grown up, she had a heritage and decided to realize her antique dreams, totally dedicating her life to travel.
Firstly, she went to the Holy Land. Then she never stopped, exploring all the world in several trips, curious to know different locations and people, always keeping an open mind and without prejudices.
In each situation she demonstrated the strength and the courage of an independent woman who is able to face any situations, from aggressions to thefts to exotic diseases.
She wrote a lot of travel notes, very useful at that time to have an idea of the world, and probably she even inspired Jules Verne’s tour of the world.
The peculiarity of Ida’s journey is that, for the first time, a woman demonstrated that a woman can do a solo tour of the world, without the support of a husband or of a lover.
However, she is not well known: she is not even quoted among people who in history have done the tour of the world (she did two tours of the world!)
She was a partner of geographic societies in Berlin and in Paris, but not of the London Royal Geographical Society because she was a woman.
In this blog, I focus on her first tour of the world, who she made circumnavigating the globe, always heading west, which lasted in 2 years and 7 months.
