Autumn in Venice

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


In the autumn of 1948 Hemingway was approaching fifty and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade. He travelled for the first time to Venice and there, at a duck shoot in the lagoon he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking young Venetian woman just out of finishing school. What followed was a platonic love affair; he continued to visit her in Venice; she in turn came to Cuba while he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. This is the illuminating story of a writer and a muse that intimately examines both the cost to Adriana and the fractured heart and changing art of Hemingway in his fifties.

'Hemingway [is] an enduringly fascinating character, one whom di Robilant, with his easy-paced style, has sympathetically brought to life.' 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