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 18-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 time to Venice, which Hemingway called "absolutely god-damned wonderful." 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. Andrea di Robilant--whose great uncle moved in Hemingway's revolving circle of bon vivants, aristocrats, and artists--recreates 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"--

Ernest Hemingway and his last muse

Autumn in Venice

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.

Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse

A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World

This Earthly Globe

The world of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Venice is revealed through the life of Lucia Mocenigo and her letters to her sister as she details the milieu of the Venetian aristocracy, the fall of Venice to Napoleon, her relationship with the Empress Josephine, affair with an Austrian officer, and firsthand account of the 1814 defeat of Bonaparte in Paris. 50,000 first printing.

A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon

Lucia

In 1787, the beautiful Lucia is married off to Alvise Mocenigo, scion of one of the most powerful Venetian families. But their life as a golden couple will be suddenly transformed when Venice falls to Bonaparte. We witness Lucia's painful series of miscarriages and the pressure on her to produce an heir; her impassioned affair with an Austrian officer; the glamour and strain of her career as a hostess in Vienna; and her amazing firsthand account of the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. With his brave and articulate heroine, Andrea di Robilant has once again reached across the centuries, and deep into his own past, to bring history to rich and vivid life on the page.

A Venetian Life in the Age of Napleon

In 1754 Andrea Memmo, the dashing and gifted scion of a distinguished Catholic family, fell in love with the beautiful Giustiniana Wynne, a match which the rules of the time forbade. Their impossible love was to last six tumultuous years. The lovers chased each other through peeling palazzos, ballrooms, salons, theatres and gambling dens, rubbing shoulders with Canaletto, Tiepolo and others. Increasingly desperate, they decided Giustiniana should marry so they could continue to see one another. She passed a summer flirting with the English patron of the arts, Consul Joseph Smith, while writing comical letters to her lover nearby. But Smith soon realized the deception. The affair became public, with disastrous consequences. The lovers' friend, Casanova, was imprisoned for his pernicious influence.

A True Story of Impossible Love in the Eighteenth Century

A Venetian Affair

The discovery of a box of eighteenth-century love letters thrusts Andrea di Robilant into an adventure of familial intrique that will carry him back hundreds of years to the golden era of Venice and into the middle of a secret love affair between Venetian statesman Andrea Memmo and Giustiniana Wynne, a beautiful, half-English girl. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

In the waning days of Venice’s glory in the mid-1700s, Andrea Memmo was scion to one the city’s oldest patrician families. At the age of twenty-four he fell passionately in love with sixteen-year-old Giustiniana Wynne, the beautiful, illegitimate daughter of a Venetian mother and British father. Because of their dramatically different positions in society, they could not marry. And Giustiniana’s mother, afraid that an affair would ruin her daughter’s chances to form a more suitable union, forbade them to see each other. Her prohibition only fueled their desire and so began their torrid, secret seven-year-affair, enlisting the aid of a few intimates and servants (willing to risk their own positions) to shuttle love letters back and forth and to help facilitate their clandestine meetings. Eventually, Giustiniana found herself pregnant and she turned for help to the infamous Casanova–himself infatuated with her. Two and half centuries later, the unbelievable story of this star-crossed couple is told in a breathtaking narrative, re-created in part from the passionate, clandestine letters Andrea and Giustiniana wrote to each other.

A True Tale of Forbidden Love in the 18th Century

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. 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.

From the author of the best-selling A Venetian Affair, here is the charming chronicle of his search for the identity of a mysterious old rose. Andrea di Robilant’s tale takes us back to the time of Josephine Bonaparte, as well as into some of the most delightful rose gardens in Italy today, brought to colorful life on the page in the watercolors of artist Nina Fuga. In his 2008 biography of the Venetian lady Lucia Mocenigo (his great-great-great-great- grandmother), di Robilant described a pink rose that grows wild on the family’s former country estate, mentioning its light peach-and-raspberry scent. This passing detail led to an invitation for an audience with a local rose doyenne, Eleonora Garlant. She and other experts wondered if di Robilant’s unnamed rose could possibly be one of the long-lost China varieties that nineteenth-century European growers had cultivated but which have since disappeared. On the hunt for the identity of his anonymous yet quietly distinctive rose, Di Robilant finds himself captivated by roseophiles through time––from Lucia and her friend Josephine Bonaparte to the gifted Eleonora, whose garden of nearly fifteen hundred varieties of old roses is one of the most significant in Europe––and by the roses themselves, each of which has a tale to tell. What starts out as a lighthearted quest becomes a meaningful journey as di Robilant contemplates the enduring beauty of what is passed down to us in a rose, through both the generosity of nature and the cultivating hand of human beings, who for centuries have embraced and extended the life of this mysterious flower.

Andrea Di Robilant

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