Autumn in Venice

Perfect for fans of The Paris Wife The story of Ernest Hemingway's love affair with Venice, and the eighteen-year-old muse he found there. 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. 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 final years.