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.