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The remarkable story of Hemingway´s love affair with both the city of Venice and the muse he found there.

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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

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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.

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