Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse

(Paperback, Main)

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National Geographic Traveller's the best books on European cities, 2019

The remarkable story of Hemingway's love affair with both the city of Venice and the muse he found there - a young Italian girl who inspired him to complete his great final work.

In the autumn of 1948 Hemingway and his fourth wife travelled for the first time to Venice, which Hemingway called 'a goddam wonderful city'. He was a year shy of his fiftieth birthday and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade.

At a duck shoot in the lagoon he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking Venetian girl just out of finishing school. Di Robilant - whose great uncle moved in Hemingway's revolving circle of bon vivants, aristocrats, and artists - recreates with sparkling clarity this surprising, years-long relationship.

Hemingway used Adriana as the model for Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees, and continued to visit Venice to see her; the Ivanciches travelled to Cuba, placing Adriana beside him as he wrote The Old Man and the Sea.

This illuminating story of writer and muse - which also examines the cost to a young woman of her association with a larger-than-life literary celebrity - is an intimate look at the fractured heart and changing art of Hemingway in his fifties.

Reviews

A saga that grips and enthrals from start to finish. * Sunday Times *
Hemingway [is] an enduringly fascinating character, one whom di Robilant, with his easy-paced style, has sympathetically brought to life. -- Andrew Lycett * Literary Review *
Effortlessly and expertly explores the secret desires, successes, and depressive obstacles that shrouded Ernest Hemingway's final productive years. * New York Journal of Books *
Fascinating and mildly addictive * Culture Calling *
Rich with new material, some based on Italian sources, di Robilant's lively and affecting double portrait brings a fresh perspective to the much-examined life of an all-too-human writer. * Booklist (starred review) *
A sensitive recounting of a writer's doomed fantasy. * Kirkus Reviews *
An evocative and alluring tale of love and death . . . In his effusive letters to Adriana, Hemingway laid bare his extremely passionate, generous, and contradictory nature. * La Stampa (Italy) *
One of the most wrenching and scandalous love stories in all of literary biography . . . di Robilant reconstructs their tale with remarkable precision and a wealth of unpublished materials . . . what emerges is an ample, finely detailed fresco of the last stage of Hemingway's life, a kaleidoscopic succession of relationships, passions, trips, editorial disputes, drinking binges, set against the backdrop of northeast Italy . . . [Autumn in Venice] has all the intrigue and emotion of a novel. * Il Piccolo (Italy) *

Author Bio

Andrea di Robilant was born in Italy and educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in international affairs. He is the author of A Venetian Affair, Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, Irresistible North: From Venice To Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers and Chasing the Rose. He lives in Rome.