Ramona Máxima Aguirre, was one of eight children. She enjoyed gardening and playing the violin. Her family was of Creole origins and religious. Her father, Manuel Silvio Cecilio Ocampo Regueira, was born in 1860 and was an architect. He was one of nine children and had a conservative character. In winter, Ocampo visited her great-grandfather, who lived nearby, daily. During the summer, her family lived in a villa in San Isidro, a modern house that in its time had electricity and running water. Currently, this house (Villa Ocampo) is a UNESCO site and recognized as a historical monument. In the summer, she took classes on the second floor, where she learned the fundamentals that would later help her become a writer. The critic Patricia Nisbet Klingenberg maintains, however, that as a child Ocampo "lived a lonely existence, relieved primarily by the companionship of various household workers [. . . ] This, then, is the place from which her works emerge, from memory and identification with those identified as other." Two events that had a significant impact on Ocampo in her youth were the marriage of her sister Victoria and the death of her sister Clara. She stated that Victoria's marriage had taken away her youth: "Hubo un episodio de mi niñez que marcó mucho nuestra relación. Victoria me quitó la niñera que yo más quería, la que más me cuidó, la que más me mimó: Fanni. Ella me quería a mí más que a nadie. Fanni sabía que yo la adoraba, pero cuando Victoria se casó y se la llevó con ella nadie se atrevió a oponérsele" [There was an episode from my childhood that strongly marked our relationship. Victoria took away the nanny that I loved the most, the one who cared for me the most, the one who pampered me the most: Fanni. She loved me more than anyone else. Fanni knew I adored her, but when Victoria married and took her with her, no one dared to oppose her]. She also stated that she began to hate socializing once Clara died. In 1908, Ocampo traveled to Europe for the first time with her family. Later she studied drawing in Paris with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger. Among her friends was the Italian writer Italo Calvino, who prefaced her stories. Back in Buenos Aires, she worked on painting with Norah Borges and María Rosa Oliver. She held