This is the illuminating story of Hemingway’s love affair with both the city of Venice and the muse he found there.
In the autumn of 1948 Hemingway and his fourth wife travelled for the first time to Venice. 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 Adriana Ivancich, a striking Venetian girl just out of finishing school. Hemingway used Adriana as the model for Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees and continued to visit Venice to see her.