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

Review: 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 di Robilant reconstructs their tale with remarkable precision and a wealth of unpublished materials .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) *