Book : Autumn In Venice - Di Robilant, Andrea

-Titulo Original : Autumn In Venice

-Fabricante :

Vintage

-Descripcion Original:

The 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-Autumn in Venice is an intimate look at Hemingway’s final years.In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife traveled for the first time to Venice, which Hemingway called “absolutely god-damned wonderful.” A year shy of his fiftieth birthday, Hemingway hadn’t published a novel in nearly a decade when he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking Venetian girl just out of finishing school. Here Andrea di Robilant re-creates with sparkling clarity this surprising, years-long relationship, during which Adriana inspired a man thirty years her senior to complete his great final work. Hemingway used Adriana as the model for Renata in Across the River and into the Trees, and continued to visit Venice to see her; when the Ivanciches traveled to Cuba, Adriana was there as he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Review “Di Robilant captures the full panoply of [Hemingway’s] quirks and conflicts.” -The Washington Post“A saga that grips and enthralls from start to finish.” -The Times (London)“[Autumn in Venice] reads like a novel, not a biography, and avid readers, of any genre, should secure a copy.” -Idaho Statesman“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) “Autumn in Venice effortlessly and expertly explores the secret desires, successes, and depressive obstacles that shrouded Ernest Hemingway’s final productive years. . . . [A] methodically researched account.” -The New York Journal of Books “A sensitive recounting of a writer’s doomed fantasy.” -Kirkus Reviews “One of the most wrenching and scandalous love stories in all of literary biography. . . . 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) “Di Robilant’s portrait is of a once-great writer getting ‘awfully dreggy at the end’-like the two bottles of Valpolicella that he took to bed each night.” -The Spectator “An evocative and alluring tale of love and death.” -La Stampa (Italy) About the Author 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. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Prologue In the autumn of 1948, Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, traveled to northern Italy and visited Venice for the first time. They had not planned it that way: their initial intention, when they had sailed from Cuba, was to disembark in the south of France, drive across Provence, and head on to Paris. But a mechanical failure forced the ship to dock in the port of Genoa. Hemingway had known the city well in his youth: it was from Genoa that he had sailed home on the Giuseppe Verdi after World War I, and it was to Genoa that he had returned several times in the twenties, both on assignment as a young reporter and on holiday with his first wife, Hadley Richardson. As Hemingway set foot on Italian soil, old memories resurfaced, and a longing to see the country took over. He and Mary set off on a serendipitous journey that took them to the lake region in Lombardy, then on to the Dolomites, and finally down into the Veneto, and to Fossalta di Piave, the little town huddled on the southern bank of the Piave River, wher