Autumn in Venice

National Geographic Travellers the best books on European cities, 2019

In the autumn of 1948 Hemingway was approaching fifty and hadnt 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 Hemingways final productive years.New York Journal of Books