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Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse
Autumn in Venice Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse Author:Andrea Di Robilant The acclaimed author of A Venetian Affair now gives us the remarkable story of Hemingway's love affair with both the city of Venice and the muse he found there--a vivacious eighteen-year-old who inspired the man thirty years her senior to complete his great final work. — In the fall of 1948 Hemingway and his fourth wife traveled for the first tim... more »e to Venice, which Hemingway called "a goddam wonderful city." He was a year shy of his fiftieth birthday and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade. At a duck shoot in the lagoon he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking Venetian girl just out of finishing school. Di Robilant--whose great-uncle moved in Hemingway's revolving circle of bon vivants, aristocrats, and artists--re-creates with sparkling clarity this surprising, years-long relationship. 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. This 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--is an intimate look at the fractured heart and changing art of Hemingway in his fifties.« less