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• Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2018
• Face to Face: The Photographs of Camilla McGrath Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2020
• This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Race to Map the World Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2024

1. This earthly globe : a Venetian geographer and the race to map the world LCCN 2023038271 Type of material Book Personal name Di Robilant, Andrea, 1957- author. Main title This earthly globe : a Venetian geographer and the race to map the world / Andrea di Robilant. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. Projected pub date 2406 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780593801703 (eBook) (hardcover) (trade paperback) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Face to face : the photographs of Camilla McGrath LCCN 2019048192 Type of material Book Personal name McGrath, Camilla, 1925-2007, author. Uniform title Photographs. Selections Main title Face to face : the photographs of Camilla McGrath / Andrea di Robilant with Griffin Dunne, Vincent Fremont, Harrison Ford, Fran Lebowitz, and Jann Wenner. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. Description 341 pages : chiefly illustrations (some color) ; 32 cm ISBN 9780525656463 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER TR681.F3 M425 2020 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Autumn in Venice : Ernest Hemingway and his last muse LCCN 2017044036 Type of material Book Personal name Di Robilant, Andrea, 1957- author. Main title Autumn in Venice : Ernest Hemingway and his last muse / Andrea Di Robilant. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Description xiv, 348 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm ISBN 9781101946657 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3515.E37 Z58546 2018 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Wikipedia -

  Andrea di Robilant

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  Andrea di Robilant
  Born 13 February 1957
  Rome, Italy
  Education Columbia University (BA, MIA)
  Alma mater Institut Le Rosey
  Occupations
  Journalistwriterprofessor
  Employer American University of Rome
  Andrea di Robilant (born 13 February 1957) is an Italian journalist and writer.[1]

  Early life and education
  Di Robilant was born in Rome, Italy, and attended a Swiss boarding school, Institut Le Rosey. He moved to New York for university, where he earned his BA in History in 1979 from Columbia College and his MA in International Relations from the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in 1980.[2]

  He is the eldest of three sons of Count Alvise Nicolis di Robilant e Cereaglio, of Piedmontese and Venetian ancestry, and American Elizabeth, née Stokes.[3] His father, a descendant of Italian statesman and diplomat Carlo Felice Nicolis, conte di Robilant, was managing director of Sotheby's in Italy; he was found murdered in his apartment in the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence in 1997, aged 72. The murder remains unsolved.[4][5][6][7]

  Other members of his family include General Mario Nicolis di Robilant, who commanded the Italian Fourth Army at Monte Grappa during World War I.[8]

  His great-great-great-great grandmother, Lucia Memmo, married Alvise Mocenigo, a member of the House of Mocenigo that played a pivotal role in Venice's history. In 1818, Lucia rented the piano nobile of Palazzo Mocenigo to Lord Byron, who wrote parts of Don Juan at the family mansion, and hosted illustrious figures such as François-René de Chateaubriand and Effie Ruskin throughout her life.[9][10] Lucia's father, Andrea Memmo, was the Venetian ambassador to the Papal States and a prominent citizen of the Republic of Venice.[11][12] Both of di Robilant's ancestors became subjects of his books.[4]

  Career
  After he finished school, he was hired as a reporter for the New Jersey-based Italian-American newspaper, Il Progresso Italo-Americano.[10] He later joined La Repubblica as a U.S. correspondent, covering the Ronald Reagan presidency, the Central American crisis, and the Falklands War.[10] He then traveled to South America and covered local affairs for a number of publications and was The Dallas Morning News's Latin American correspondent in Buenos Aires, where he covered the end of military regimes in South America.[10]

  He returned to Italy in 1987 to start a monthly city magazine in Milan named "02" but the magazine folded only after a year, which made him return to journalism. He joined La Stampa and became its diplomatic correspondent and in 1996, he became the paper's bureau chief in Washington, D.C., where he covered Bill Clinton's second term in office.[10]

  In 2003, di Robilant wrote his first book A Venetian Affair, a biography of his ancestor, Andrea Memmo, in 18th century Venice based on his correspondence with Giustiniana Wynne found in the Palazzo Mocenigo;[13] and a sequel entitled Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon (2008) based on Andrea's daughter, Lucia Mocenigo.[14] He subsequently left La Stampa to pursue a full-time writing career.[10][15]

  In 2011, he published Irresistible North: From Venice to Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers, in which he analyses the claim that two Venetian merchants, the Zeno brothers, sailed over the north Atlantic in a pre-Columbian expedition to North America.[16] His new book, Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse was published in 2018.[17][18]

  Di Robilant lives in Rome. He is a writer and a professor at The American University of Rome.[10][15][19]

  Personal life
  He and his wife, Alessandra Mattirolo, have two sons, Tommaso and Sebastiano.[4][10]

• American University of Rome website - https://aur.edu/faculty/andrea-di-robilant

  Role
  Adjunct Faculty
  Email
  a.dirobilant@aur.edu
  Program
  Bachelor Degree in Communication & Digital Media
  Bachelor Degree in Archaeology & Classics
  Bachelor Degree in English Writing, Literature and Publishing
  Education
  BA in History, Columbia University - New York, USA
  MA in International Relations, Columbia University - New York, USA

  Biography
  Andrea di Robilant was born in Rome in 1957, the son of Alvise di Robilant, an Italian of Piedmontese and Venetian ancestry, and Elizabeth Stokes, an American from Lynchburg, Virginia. He was raised in Rome with his two younger brothers, Filippo and Tristano, during the twilight years of the Dolce Vita.

  After struggling at the French Lycée in Rome, he was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, got down to studying and obtained his French Baccalaureat degree. In 1975 he travelled to Iran and took a job teaching English at the university in Tehran; with his savings, he set off on the well-worn hippy trail across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and South East Asia.

  In 1977 he headed for New York City and enrolled at Columbia University. He earned a B.A. degree in History and a master’s degree from the School of International Affairs. During his studies he worked as a free-lance journalist for Italian newspapers and magazines covering the Carter presidency and the Iran hostage crisis.

  In 1981 he was hired as a reporter for Il Progresso italo-americano, a daily Italianlanguage paper based in New Jersey. A year later he joined La Repubblica, then a new and fast-growing newspaper, as a U.S. correspondent based in New York. He travelled extensively across the United States covering the Reagan presidency, the wars in Central America and the War of the Falklands.

  In 1984 he left La Repubblica and travelled over-land from New York to Buenos Aires reporting from Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and Argentina for a number of publications. He was based in Buenos Aires for two years and covered the end of the military regimes in South America for The Dallas Morning News.

  At the end of his Latin American stint he returned to Italy to start "02", a monthly city magazine in Milan. The idea was to combine good writing with quality black and white photography, letting loose on the city the large pool of talented young fashion photographers. The magazine had a short but happy life (1987-88) chronicling the seamier side of Milanese society, including the rise of real-estate, advertising and television mogul and future prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. He shut down "02" before it lost too much money and returned to daily journalism as a reporter for La Stampa, a well-respected national daily based in Turin. He was assigned to the Rome bureau. He married Alessandra Mattirolo, and had two boys, Tommaso and Sebastiano. But before long he was back on the road as La Stampa’s diplomatic correspondent.

  In 1996 he returned to the United States as the paper’s bureau chief, based inWashington D.C. and covered Clinton’s second term in office. Following the election of George W. Bush, he took a year-long leave of absence and moved to Venice with his family to write his first book, A Venetian Affair – the true story of an impossible love set in eighteenth century Venice. Published in 2003, it was selected as a New York Times "notable book of the year."

  He went back to his job at La Stampa but was soon working on a sequel. Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, the biography of his great-great-great-great grandmother, Lucia Mocenigo, which was published in 2007.

  He left La Stampa for a full-time writing career and started to work on his latest book, Irresistible North, the controversial story of two Venetian brothers who travelled to the North Atlantic in the fourteenth century.

  He now divides his time between Rome, where he lives with his family, and the island of Giudecca, in Venice, where he has a small house with a garden. He is currently at work on his next project, a book on sixteenth century cartography.

• Andrea di Robilant website - https://www.andreadirobilant.com

  Andrea di Robilant was born in Rome in 1957, the son of Alvise di Robilant, an Italian
  of Piedmontese and Venetian ancestry, and Elizabeth Stokes, an American from
  Lynchburg, Virginia. He was raised in Rome with his two younger brothers, Filippo and
  Tristano, during the twilight years of the Dolce Vita.
  After struggling at the French Lycée in Rome, he was sent to boarding school in
  Switzerland, got down to studying and obtained his French Baccalaureat degree. In 1975
  he travelled to Iran and took a job teaching English at the university in Tehran; with his
  savings, he set off on the well-worn hippy trail across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India,
  Nepal and South East Asia.
  In 1977 he headed for New York City and enrolled at Columbia University. He earned
  a B.A. degree in History and a master’s degree from the School of International Affairs.
  During his studies he worked as a free-lance journalist for Italian newspapers and
  magazines covering the Carter presidency and the Iran hostage crisis.
  In 1981 he was hired as a reporter for Il Progresso italo-americano, a daily Italianlanguage
  paper based in New Jersey. A year later he joined La Repubblica, then a new
  and fast-growing newspaper, as a U.S. correspondent based in New York. He travelled
  extensively across the United States covering the Reagan presidency, the wars in
  Central America and theWar of the Falklands.
  In 1984 he left La Repubblica and travelled over-land from New York to Buenos Aires
  reporting from Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil
  and Argentina for a number of publications. He was based in Buenos Aires for two years
  and covered the end of the military regimes in South America for The Dallas Morning
  News.
  At the end of his Latin American stint he returned to Italy to start "02", a monthly
  city magazine in Milan. The idea was to combine good writing with quality black and
  white photography, letting loose on the city the large pool of talented young fashion
  photographers. The magazine had a short but happy life (1987-88) chronicling the seamier
  side of Milanese society, including the rise of real-estate, advertising and television mogul
  and future prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
  He shut down "02" before it lost too much money and returned to daily journalism as
  a reporter for La Stampa, a well-respected national daily based in Turin. He was assigned
  to the Rome bureau. He married Alessandra Mattirolo, and had two boys, Tommaso
  and Sebastiano. But before long he was back on the road as La Stampa’s diplomatic
  correspondent.
  In 1996 he returned to the United States as the paper’s bureau chief, based inWashington
  D.C. and covered Clinton’s second term in office. Following the election of GeorgeW.
  Bush, he took a year-long leave of absence and moved to Venice with his family to write
  his first book, A Venetian Affair – the true story of an impossible love set in eighteenth
  century Venice. Published in 2003, it was selected as a New York Times "notable book of
  the year."
  The sequel, Lucia: a Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon, a biography of his great-great-great-great grandmother, was published in 2007. That same year he left La Stampa to write full-time. Irresistible North, the controversial story of two Venetian brothers who traveled to the North Atlantic in the fourteenth century, was published in 2011. Next came Chasing the Rose, a serendipitous journey in search for the origins of an old Chinese rose, the Rosa Mocenigo, later made into a successful perfume of that name. Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and his Last Muse, published by Knopf in 2018, is his latest book. Currently at work on a story about books and maps in the Venetian Renaissance, he divides his time between Rome, where he lives with his family and where he teaches creative writing, and Venice, where he has a small garden on the island of the Giudecca.

• Rosy BVM - https://rosybvm.com/2021/03/30/rosy-conversation-with-andrea-di-robilant/

  ROSY CONVERSATION WITH ANDREA DI ROBILANT
  March 30, 2021

  Andrea di Robilant is an Italian journalist and writer who has written five well-received books of non-fiction. During his forty-year career in journalism, Andrea has worked in Europe, Latin America and the United States, where he was U.S. correspondent for the daily La Repubblica (1980-84) and U.S. Bureau Chief for La Stampa in Washington D.C. during the Clinton years. He attended Le Rosey in Switzerland and received a B.A. and a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University in New York City.

  In 2003 Andrea published A Venetian Affair, his best-selling account of two star-crossed lovers in Eighteenth century Venice based on a cache of letters his father, Alvise di Robilant, found in the attic of the family’s palazzo. His next book was a biography of Lucia Memmo, his great-great-great-great grandmother, who was a close friend of Josephine Bonaparte, the wife of Napoleon. In 2011 he published Irresistible North, a book about a controversial Fourteenth century journey of two Venetian navigators Nicolo and Antonio Zen in the North Atlantic in the Fourteenth Century. Three years later he published Chasing the Rose, which tells the story of his own journey in search of a mysterious rose. His most recent book, Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse, published in 2018, is about Ernest Hemingway’s relationship with a young woman named Adriana Ivancich in Venice in the 1950s. Andrea is now in the midst of writing a book about maps and travels in the Renaissance. You can find his website for more information here.

  OUR CONVERSATION
  Bianca: I think you spent quite a while decoding your family’s letters with A Venetian Affair. How long did decoding the love letters take?

  Andrea: My father found these letters in a shoebox in the palazzo in Venice where he had grown up and he brought the box home one day and none of us knew what they were. It didn’t really make sense to us who was writing, what they were about… most of them were written in a secret code. It was very pretty. It looked like there were a lot of hieroglyphics on the page… it was a very quick hand, not a labored job. It was rather intriguing and very beautiful to look at. We started trying to crack the code and my father took on the job, it was he who had found the letters and eventually it was he who cracked the code and then he transcribed all of the letters.

  Out of that labor came this fascinating love story between my ancestor Andrea Memmo and Giustiniana Wynne, the illegitimate daughter of an English baronet. It was really thanks to my father that we were able to understand who was writing and what the story was about. It became my father’s favorite conversation piece. After my father died I thought I should pull all the strings together and write the book that he should have written. That said, the book is more than the transcription of the letters. I use the letters as a starting point of a historical research that enabled me to recreate the background – social, political, artistic – of the period. So the book is not limited to their story, it is really about a period of history, the last decades of the declining Venetian Republic.

  The story of this impossible love is emblematic of the inability of this ancient Republic to reform, to modernize itself, to make it possible for two young people who loved each other to marry – despite the fact that Andrea was the scion of one of the Venetian Republic’s oldest families. Of course there were masked balls and all of that, but the reality was that the Venetian Republic was slowly dying because it simply could not marshall the energies necessary to reform itself. There is something very poignant in that. Andrea’s struggles must be seen against that backdrop.

  Bianca: Your book after A Venetian Affair, was about Andrea Memmo’s daughter, Lucia Memmo, entitled, Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon. What inspired you to write this book?

  Andrea: After I had written A Venetian Affair, I found another shoebox of letters – this is not a joke – and I realized that these had belonged to Lucia. She makes a brief appearance in A Venetian Affair towards the end. Andrea visits Giustiniana in Padua on her deathbed. She is dying of a tumor and Andrea traveled all night long to be with her in her last moments, the woman of his life. Lucia, his daughter, was also present. She writes about this in a letter and describes her father’s tortured face as he holds Giustiniana’s hand. It’s a very moving scene.

  From there, I went on to write Lucia’s story and it was very fascinating for other reasons. The story of Lucia was the story of an intelligent, highly educated, attractive woman living in a time in Europe when great events are happening and the scene is constantly changing – you have the death of the Venetian Republic, Napoleon bursts onto the scene and Lucia adapts to her new life. It was fascinating for me to find such an eloquent witness of those times and to be able to see those rapid changes happening in Europe through the eyes of an intelligent woman and a wonderful writer! She was always in the thick of things and wrote diaries and letters that are illuminating. Thanks to her I was able to write a book that has the sweep of a novel, though it’s all true and documented. It started out with a batch of letters. The batch of letters were fascinating. They told the story of the arranged marriage between Lucia and Alvise Mocenigo. This is very ironic because her father, Andrea, arranged her marriage – a man who fought so hard to try to marry the love of his life and failed. The letters I found were between Lucia and Alvise before they actually met. It’s a fascinating correspondence that gradually turns into love… you know how today, people can fall in love just by communicating online? This is very similar. You can see their relationship burgeoning and growing into something substantial through words. That really sparked my interest and I went looking for more material on Lucia in the archives in Venice.

  Bianca: Your next book, Chasing the Rose, is set during the time of Josephine Bonaparte, Napoleon’s first wife. Can you give an overview of that wonderful book?

  Andrea: While Lucia was in Paris, she was a good friend of Josephine’s, she became a botanist of sorts – she became very knowledgeable about roses in particular. Josephine was an important figure in the world of roses. She was able to import roses from China and the arrival of these roses to France and to Europe in general at the end of the 18th century was a great moment in the history of rose breeding. It was the arrival of these roses from China that really transformed the landscape of roses in France and across Europe. Josephine made it very fashionable for the other grandes dames of Parisian society to have their own rose gardens. It was truly a Golden Age for roses. As I said, Lucia was at the center of all of this, observing everything and absorbing all of this. She returned to Venice to her house in the country and she brought back hundreds of roses. And she created her own rose garden and a park that became a model of its kind. Alas, nothing has remained of that garden, except this one rose.

  It grows wild in what used to be the park and is now just woodlands. I had no idea about the existence of this rose until one day, I was called up by people who lived near the woods. They had found this mysterious rose growing wild there and they couldn’t figure out what it was, nor where it came from. Since I had written a book about Lucia, they thought I might know something about it. I wondered if there was some connection between that wild rose and the roses that Lucia had brought back from Paris.

  People in the area had named it Rosa Moceniga, because that was Lucia’s married name – the Mocenigos are my ancestors. So I went to see the rose in the woods, and the people there gave me a small plant and I took it back home and planted it in my garden in Venice. It grew very well on its own, despite the bitter cold in the winter and the salty air and it took over the garden and it forced me to focus on this rose and I became more and more intrigued about this rose’s history. It looked to be a Chinese rose of some kind. Chasing the Rose is really the story of my journey into the world of old roses searching for the identity of this particular rose… I gave myself a late education in roses…Along the way I met fascinating people who knew a lot about roses and I went to Paris and finally I solved the mystery. And now the rose is officially recognized as the Moceniga Rose.

  Readers wrote to me suggesting I should make a perfume from this rose. It was a cool idea but I knew nothing about perfumes so I let it go. Then, one day, I went to see the Perfume Museum in Venice, which is a new museum in an old Palazzo Mocenigo which had long ago belonged to my family. I found the museum fascinating, it was really well done and I thought to myself – if I ever do a perfume, I want to do it with the people who set up this museum. I asked mutual friends to arrange a meeting between me and the head of the company, The Merchant of Venice, which makes wonderful perfumes. They go back four generations in Venice. I told the head of the company that I’d written a book about a rose and they happened to have a perfume museum in a Palazzo that had the same name as my rose – Moceniga. They thought it over and then they called me a few weeks later and said it was a great idea. Within a year, they had produced the fragrance in a beautiful Murano glass. In fact, it’s been so successful that Rosa Moceniga is their best selling perfume today. During the Pandemic we produced a Rosa Moceniga hand sanitizing gel that became very popular…!

  Bianca: Is there a favorite time in history you enjoy researching the most?

  Andrea: My father studied history, I studied history at university and so did both my sons. I guess it runs in the family. But I am not a historian. I am a reporter interested in history – and I use journalistic techniques in my research. I like to relive moments of history through other people and to find keys to understand the past. For example, in writing another book, Irresistible North, I was fascinated by the idea of these two brothers, two Venetian merchants who were trying to expand the bounds of their world to broaden their market… they were shipwrecked in the North Sea and ended up in the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and this was back in the 1300s. They published their letters and a map about their voyages – nobody in Europe had yet made a map about that part of the world. Three hundred years later the map was denounced as a fake for what I thought were spurious reasons and I wanted to get to the bottom of the story. So there was a journalistic angle to that.

  The book about Hemingway and his love story with Adriana Ivancich started by chance. One day I was taking a walk on the Venetian mainland and I ended up in someone’s property. I was actually trespassing and didn’t realize it. I kept going further until the owner drove up to me. He was an old man who had just had a stroke. I apologized and explained to him that I had wandered onto his property without knowing… he invited me in and I learned that he was the older brother of Adriana, the eighteen year-old girl Hemingway fell in love with when he came to Venice in 1948. He mentioned that he had just sold the last batch of letters between Hemingway and Adriana to the JFK archives in Boston. I happened to be going to Boston a few weeks later on a book tour and I went and checked on the letters in the library. And the letters were there, sure enough, and there were many others! I immersed myself in them. I must have spent two or three days locked in the library reading letters. I realized this story was not simply an anecdotal story, this was a major love story that had a great impact on Hemingway’s career as a writer. Most Hemingway biographies don’t give this story the importance it’s due. So I thought it would be a good idea to write a whole book about it.

  It was also a matter of recreating life in those years not just in Venice but also in Cuba, because Adriana eventually went to Cuba to stay with the Hemingways. She went with her mother! The whole set up at the Hemingway estate turned into a sort of Tennessee Williams drama in the Tropics.…In any case the appearance of Adriana in Hemingway’s life really galvanized him and got him writing again — he had not published a book in ten years. But Adriana was also deeply affected by their relationship – perhaps more so than she realized at the time. Years later she took her life after suffering from depression. Like Hemingway. I thought it was a very compelling story that needed to be written.

  Bianca: Your family heritage plays such a significant role in your writing. Your most recent book though, Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse, is not entirely about your family, but it does take place in Venice.

  Andrea: The Hemingway book does not have much to do with my family, even though my great uncle Carlo makes several appearances and so does my aunt Olghina. But that’s because the setting is Venice. Carlo was Hemingway’s favorite drinking buddy. He was a happy drunk, Hemingway used to say, and he liked to hang out with him at Harry’s Bar. They wrote children’s stories together, believe it or not. That was really the extent of it; although, drinking was a big part of his life in Venice.

  Bianca: There is a Ken Burns documentary about Ernest Hemingway’s life coming out on April 5th on PBS. Do you think he will mention the relationship between Hemingway and Adriana?

  Andrea: I don’t know, I am very curious myself. It’s a three-part documentary and there’s a possibility that he may not be able to cover everything! He started work on the documentary before my book came out in 2018. But I am very curious to find out. An international production has also just finished shooting the movie version of Across the River and Into the Trees, the book he wrote after meeting Adriana. It’s a strange novel, but it’s the novel that got Hemingway back to writing. So this novel was very important to him personally even though a lot of critics panned it. In the movie the Hemingway-inspired protagonist is played by Liev Schreiber, who starred in Ray Donovan, the popular American series. Fancy that! His young lover is played by a young Italian actress, Matilda de Angelis.

  THANK YOU, ANDREA, YOU ARE TRULY A ROSY ADDITION TO ROSY BVM!

• John Cabot University website - https://news.johncabot.edu/2018/10/andrea-di-robilant/

  Autumn in Venice: Professor and Author Andrea di Robilant
  by John Cabot University
  October 17, 2018
  2

  Creative Non-fiction and Travel Writing Professor Andrea di Robilant describes his transatlantic upbringing, compelling journalism career, and names five must-reads for aspiring travel writers. In addition, Professor Di Robilant also gives a glimpse into his latest, Hemingway-themed, authorial venture, Autumn in Venice, published last spring by Knopf.

  What was it like to grow up with an Italian father and an American mother?
  Ah! You should talk to my shrink! … It obviously gave me a richer background – to be familiar with two cultures, to have two languages, to be able to move from one to the other in a fairly seamless way… But when you are growing up, when you are trying to forge an identity of your own it can pose some problems. It certainly did in my case. I lived in the US for many years and thought myself American and put a certain distance between myself and my Italian roots in a forced, unnatural way. For example, for years I rarely read books in Italian. It is only with time that I was able to bring my two halves closer together – convivere is the Italian word. It’s a long, slow process.

  Your travels have taken you to many different places across the globe. What country has fascinated you the most and why?
  Iran no doubt. Not so much a country as a civilization. I went right after high school in 1975. I remember traveling cross-country and being mesmerized by the layers of history, the extraordinary architecture, the landscape, the language (I later studied Farsi at Columbia University) and yes, even the food. Eventually, I took a job as a teacher at the State University in Tehran. The Revolution was four years away but the cracks were evident.

  What did you like most about being a journalist?
  It is a profession that gives instant gratification, very libidinous in a way. You have an intuition, a sudden urge to pursue it, to figure things out. So you find the right people to talk to. And then it’s done, and you move on to the next thing. The joy of seeing the flicker of a story, chasing it, piecing it together for others to enjoy – one is on a sort of high during the whole process. And that’s true whether you are doing a major piece of investigative writing or putting together a whimsical little neighborhood story.

  What made you decide to leave journalism to become a full-time writer?
  One never really leaves journalism. The urge is always there. But daily journalism can be a grind. It leaves little time for anything else. There were books I wanted to write, and then teaching came along and it turned out to be very enjoyable and rewarding. Meanwhile, traditional print newspapers were in decline. The newsroom was not fun anymore. It was time to move on. But I still think like a journalist, even when I’m writing biographies or history books. Now and then someone will say something and I will say to myself: “Damn … that would be a good story to write.” And sometimes I do write it for some magazine or other. And it’s like giving myself a little treat.

  What was the biggest challenge you have faced in your career?
  As a journalist, the biggest challenge was covering Italian politics after years of being a foreign correspondent. As an author I suppose that writing a book about Ernest Hemingway, about whom so much had already been written, was something of a challenge. I was constantly worried about the literary firing squads ready to open fire. Teaching is really about sustaining a conversation – especially in courses like the ones I teach. As in all conversations, the biggest challenge is to avoid reacting defensively to criticism.

  How did you get the idea to write Autumn in Venice?
  I am not a Hemingway scholar and I wasn’t even a particular fan of his. But one day I met a man who told me that he had sold the last batch of letters Hemingway had written to his friend’s sister, an attractive young Venetian woman, to the JFK Library. I thought there might be an interesting story there so I pursued it, and eventually, it led to Autumn in Venice.

  Did you write the book in Italian and translate it yourself into English? What challenges did this present?
  I wrote the book in English because my main publisher is American. It wouldn’t do to hand in a manuscript in Italian! Then I translated and rewrote it into bad Italian. My wife Alessandra helped me put it into good, readable, Italian. Translating oneself is much more difficult than one thinks. You tend to put the automatic pilot on. There is no creative process. You think you are doing a fine job but the prose is lifeless. And the funny thing is you don’t realize how bad it is – until someone tells you. So I wouldn’t be able to do it without Alessandra. But otherwise, I’m equally at home in English and Italian. My career in journalism was mostly in Italian. But I wrote all of my books in English.

  Autumn in Venice is described as “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.” Given that Venice is the backdrop of many of your works, could it be said that the city is your muse as well?
  It certainly has been a source of inspiration. The city, its archives, just brim with good stories. But Venice the muse has inspired me for nearly twenty years now, and I think we’re both feeling the wear and tear. It’s probably time to move on. But not before I write one more book on Venice and the Renaissance.

  What is the most important thing that you teach your students in your Creative Non-fiction and Travel Writing courses at JCU?
  Be alert to one’s surroundings, observe, engage. Everywhere we look there are loose narrative threads that are lying dormant. The trick is to ‘see’ them and pull at them and bring them to life until they become a full-fledged story. Sometimes my students come to class and tell me they have no ideas, nothing to write about. We go over the seemingly banal incidents of everyday life, and it’s always richer than we first imagine.

  Name five books that everyone should read.
  Well, I’ll limit myself to five essential books for all aspiring travel writers: Italian Journey, because Goethe is the father and mother of travel writing; Etruscan Places, because D.H. Lawrence brought modernism to travel writing; Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, because it was the favorite book of my favorite 20th century travel writers; Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 because of the sheer beauty of the prose and Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark – travel writing that is also sublime poetry.

  Read the reviews of Autumn in Venice
  The Times: Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse by Andrea di Robilant — the gripping saga of the writer’s final fling
  The Washington Post: The Venetian teenager who stirred Hemingway’s heart and art

QUOTE: “Di Robilant’s portrait is of a once-great writer getting ‘awfully dreggy at the end’–like the two bottles of Valpolicella that he took to bed each night.”
Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse

by Andrea di Robilant

Atlantic Books, 17.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 348

One rainy evening in December 1948, a blue Buick emerged from the darkness of the Venetian lagoon near the village of Latisana and picked up an Italian girl--18, jet black wet hair, slender legs--who had been waiting for hours at the crossroads. In the car, on his way to a duck shoot, was Ernest Hemingway--round puffy face, protruding stomach and, at 49, without having published a novel in a decade, somewhat past his sell-by. He apologised for being late, and offered the rain-sodden girl a shot of whisky which, being teetotal, she refused.

So did Papa, that 'beat-up, old-looking bastard', encounter the siren he called 'my last and true love': Adriana Ivancich, a mingling of Lolita and Tadzio, who appeared to him 'as fresh as a young pine tree in the snow of the mountains' and who went on to serve as Hemingway's regenerative muse for his remaining 12 years. 'It was just something that struck me like lightning.'

Of books on Hemingway there is no end. The author of this one has some skin in the game. His great-uncle was a drinking buddy of Hemingway in Venice, and his aunt was the dedicatee of Hemingway's story 'The Faithful Bull'. Plus, growing up near Adriana in southern Tuscany, Andrea di Robilant later met her, by then more than partial to whisky, subdued, with a melancholy gaze, and 'struggling with depression'--like not a few who entered Hemingway's destructive orbit. He may have liberated English prose from mandarins such as Henry James and Edith Wharton, but he sure as heck manacled the hearts of those he tried to love. 'Women frightened him,' his third wife Martha Gellhorn used to tell me, by the by declaring that he was also 'insane' and a rotten lover. 'He wasn't talented for intimacy.'

Hemingway was in Venice by accident. He had travelled from his home in Cuba with his fourth wife Mary, and the Buick, to spend the summer touring 'Cezanne country', but they had ended up in Genoa after their ship developed rudder trouble and was forced to by-pass Cannes. In Italy, old memories and wounds revived. Thirty years earlier, when the same age as Adriana, he had been hit by a mortar shell at Fossalta. Mary wrote in her diary: 'Papa's old foot wound has opened up wide again.'

Swiftly reduced to the status of 'ghost-wife', Mary was compelled to watch the excruciating spectacle of her sozzled husband padding after Adriana 'like a puppy'. He calls Adriana 'daughter' ('You are my true and only daughter'), and invites her into a gondola to exchange 'mistakes' (their code for kisses). As the author limply puts it: 'Although they probably did not go beyond kissing and cuddling, their intimacy certainly invited speculation about a sexual relationship.' Within a short time, Hemingway credits Adriana (who does not speak much English) with the late-flowering of his creative juices: 'When I see you and I am with you I feel I can do anything and I write better than I can write.' Hmmm.

Wyndham Lewis blamed Gertrude Stein for making a clown of Hemingway by teaching him her 'baby talk', the result being that Hemingway

invariably invoked a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic
simpleton, a lethargic and stuttering
dummy ... a super-innocent, queerly sensitive
village idiot of a few words and fewer ideas.
Nowhere is that description truer of Papa than in his relationship with Adriana, which seldom rises above the level of a Trump tweet. His letters to her are as rambling and incoherent as hers to him. She writes: 'I whould [sic] have so many things to say to you that I prefer to skip them all.' And again: 'Put your eye glasses on and look at me streat [sic].' Yet dumbfounded by her 'rapier wit', he urges Adriana to write poetry (which Mondadori will publish)--'In the interior of the island of Cuba/the earth is red/red'--and to draw the cover illustrations (which Scribner will publish) for the two novels that he starts with Adriana at his side, Across the River and into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea.

Not deserving to stand on the same shelf as Lolita or Death in Venice, Across the River is a direct transcription of Hemingway's embarrassing middle-aged infatuation with a girl whose dialogue, according to Mary, was 'banal beyond reason'. Autumn in Venice goes some way to explain why that novel, which in all seriousness he considered 'a helluva book', if not his best, is quite so fascinatingly atrocious, and, in the estimation of the critic Maxwell Geismar, 'a synthesis of everything that is bad in his previous work'.

Di Robilant's portrait is of a once-great writer getting 'awfully dreggy at the end'--like the two bottles of Valpolicella that he took to bed each night. Without Adriana to leaven him, he becomes, back in Cuba, cantankerous, egotistical and moody, until she arrives with her mother on a hugely anticipated visit. Caught in this steamy menage, Mary retaliates by developing an 'intimacy' with Adriana's brother Gianfranco--who for several months had been sponging off Hemingway at the Finca Vigia. Furious at his wife's dalliance, Hemingway shoots out a light on the verandah, throws her typewriter to the ground, hurls a glass against the wall, 'leaving a large purple stain', smashes an ashtray and spits in her face.

Nor, despite infecting everyone with his 'writing bug' and encouraging Gianfranco to become a novelist, does Hemingway show any greater sensitivity towards other authors. Adopting a pugilistic stance, he rubbishes as unreadable John Dos Passos, Irwin Shaw and William Faulkner. 'Am now trying to knock down Mr Shakespeare on his ass ... I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr de Maupassant.'

When he does meet a bona fide heavyweight champion in the flesh, Scarabellini, who worked at the Venice slaughterhouse, Hemingway at once throws in the towel. 'Hey! Hey! You win. Stop! Stop!' Gellhorn said to me: 'He wanted every other writer dead. So far as he was concerned, there was only him.'

When James Jones's From Here to Eternity reached No.1 on the New York Times list, Hemingway warned their mutual editor Charles Scribner: 'Things will catch up with Jones and he will probably commit suicide.' In the event, it was Hemingway who killed himself, his last words being the refrain of a song picked up in Venice 12 years earlier, 'I am a dark-headed woman, a dark-headed woman.' As for Adriana, her marital prospects damaged by slanderous gossip concerning their relationship, she hanged herself from an olive tree in 1983.

A teacher of creative writing, di Robilant faces the challenge of marrying his own style ('the blue Buick gleamed like a captive mermaid') with the salty plain-speak and spare cadences of his subject. His prose sometimes reads like mayonnaise spread on an anchovy. He has curious solecisms for a nobleman au fait with the Veneto. He believes that the bell tower of the basilica on Torcello is a 'steeple' and that Duff Cooper was an Hon. (he was a Sir). But he has allowed me to understand Martha Gellhorn's answer when I asked her of Hemingway: 'What did you feel when he killed himself?'

'Nothing.'

Caption: Papa and his muse in Cuba

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Shakespeare, Nicholas. "The old man and the siren." Spectator, vol. 338, no. 9914, 1 Sept. 2018, pp. 28+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A553628068/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5891cdf9. Accessed 27 May 2024.

QUOTE: "di Robilant’s lively and affecting double portrait brings a fresh perspective to the much-examined life of an all-too-human writer.”
Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse. By Andrea di Robilant. June 2018.352p. illus. Knopf, $26.95 (9781101946657). 813.52.

Di Robilant (Chasing the Rose, 2014) goes deep into an emotionally disturbing period of Papa Hemingway's life. The result is a love story on two levels--one involving an alluring city, the other Hemingway's regrettably immature propensity for seeking extramarital bliss. Hemingway fell hard for an Italian woman 30 years his junior. He was traveling with wife number four, Mary Welsh Hemingway, into the mountains for skiing and into Harry's Bar for drinking with a motley pack of nobles and thrill seekers, including di Robilant's great-uncle. After 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich caught Hemingway's gaze and naively returned it, he alternated between marital disruption, extreme moodiness, and creative regeneration. The first half of the book amounts to a making-of-a-novel backgrounder: Across the River and into the Trees (1950) was Hemingway's postwar portrait of a 50-year-old veteran scouring his bitter memories and courting a 19-year-old Italian countess. Hemingway deluded himself into thinking it was his best work; many critics savaged it. Di Robilant follows Hemingway through his mostly tragic last decade to his suicide in 1961, and Ivancich to her suicide in 1983. Rich with new material, some based on Italian sources, di Robilant's lively and affecting double portrait brings a fresh perspective to the much-examined life of an all-too-human writer.--Steve Paul

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
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Paul, Steve. "Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 15, 1 Apr. 2018, pp. 44+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A534956834/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9705abcf. Accessed 27 May 2024.

QUOTE: “sensitive recounting of a writer’s doomed fantasy.”
di Robilant, Andrea AUTUMN IN VENICE Knopf (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 6, 5 ISBN: 978-1-101-94665-7

Passion, frustration, and anger erupted in Ernest Hemingway's last years.

In 1948, visiting Venice with his wife, Mary, Hemingway (1899-1961) fell madly in love with 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich. Di Robilant (Chasing the Rose: An Adventure in the Venetian Countryside, 2014, etc.) draws on memoirs (including Adriana's), letters, and biographies to reconstruct the relationship--platonic, the author believes--and its impact on Hemingway's marriage, writing, and career; and on Adriana, whose behavior was circumscribed by Venetian society's "rigid rules of moral conduct." Meeting her around town, Hemingway seemed oblivious to the malicious gossip he was generating for Adriana and her family. He made no effort to conceal his feelings: One friend was shocked to see him "drool unashamedly over Adriana." Mary was willing to tolerate his infatuation as long as it remained platonic; it "was a price she was willing to pay if it made her husband happy and a nicer person to be around." But his happiness often did not extend to his treatment of Mary; compared with Adriana, she seemed "drab" and "increasingly irritating." The marriage was rocky, exploding into violent quarrels. The tension mounted after Adriana, at Hemingway's insistence, joined the couple at their home in Cuba. There, Mary read the galleys for Across the River and into the Trees, about an older man remembering his adoration for a younger woman, obviously modeled on Adriana. Mary deeply disliked the novel, as did many reviewers when it appeared in 1950. His next novel, The Old Man and the Sea, a book encouraged by Adriana, was more warmly received. Like many other biographers, di Robilant portrays Hemingway as pathetic, petulantly envious of other writers' successes, often enraged and cruel, and suffering from depression, illnesses, injuries, and the deleterious effects of a lifetime of hard drinking. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, he was too ill to travel to Sweden. He killed himself in 1961, and Adriana, after suffering decades of depression, killed herself some two decades later.

A sensitive recounting of a writer's doomed fantasy.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"di Robilant, Andrea: AUTUMN IN VENICE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A530650699/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c9ab915c. Accessed 27 May 2024.

QUOTE: “Di Robilant connects the dots and follows them admirably in order to form the most coherent narrative of the Hemingway-Ivancich relationship ever written.”
Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse

Andrea di Robilant. Knopf, $26.95 (368p)

ISBN 978-1-101-94665-7

There are few surprises in this unilluminating account by di Robilant (Chasing the Rose) of Hemingway's infatuation with a vivacious young Italian woman. The story begins in the fall of 1948, with Hemingway and his wife, Mary, setting off for Venice, where he hoped to finish an ambitious writing project. Writing in fits and starts, he went out duck hunting early one morning and met 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich, a socialite from a prominent local family. By the time the Hemingways left Venice the following spring, his writing was flowing on the novel that would become Across the River and into the Trees, and he'd transformed Adriana into his muse. The pair kept up their relationship, corresponding and meeting several more times, while Hemingway modeled the novel's character of Renata on Adriana, and compelled his publisher to use her illustration for its cover, and another later for The Old Man and the Sea's. In addition to Ivancich's journals and Hemingway's letters, di Robilant draws on his own great-uncle Carlo di Robilant's recollections as a member of Hemingway's circle at the time. Despite this personal connection, di Robilant's account of a literary lion famous for his affairs reveals nothing particularly new about a much-written-about writer. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Ink Well Management. (June)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
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"Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 10, 5 Mar. 2018, p. 58. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A530430300/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d60fbf30. Accessed 27 May 2024.

Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse. By Andrea di Robilant. Knopf, 2018. 368 pp. Cloth $26.95.

Andrea di Robilant introduces Autumn in Venice, his deft, readable chronicle of Ernest Hemingway's mystifying relationship with Adriana Ivancich in a curious way: "I have a faded memory of Adriana" (xii). With this tantalizing remark, di Robilant lays bare the charm and great value of this book, but also its inevitable frustration. Just as Hemingway said he felt like he was struck by "lightning at the crossroads" when he met Ivancich in Latisana in 1948, this book also finds itself at crossroads of its own, caught between being an intimate personal reflection of di Robilant's father and his group of friends, and also an objective study of Ernest Hemingway and his "muse." As he openly confesses, di Robilant does not know Ivancich well enough to make it a memoir; instead, his narrative addresses the Hemingway fan who is casually intrigued by this dalliance, rather than hoping to open a new strain of Hemingway scholarship.

Despite its limitations, the book's contributions to Hemingway studies are not insignificant. To have di Robilant working in English is a considerable contribution to our understanding of Hemingway's post-war Italian years. He does not bluff his treatment of all the ancillary characters in Hemingway's circle, minute details of Italian culture, its geography and language. He has authentic insight into the Veneto of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This is the first English language treatment of Hemingway's immersion into the post-war Italian aristocracy that introduces all the familiar names of Hemingway's biography (Franchetti, Kechler, Pivano; and yes, di Robilant) and allows them to blossom into characters with personalities and traits that individuate them.

At its best, Autumn in Venice shares details no previous writer has unearthed. In a footnote (59), di Robilant relates that he found the carpenter in Fossalta di Piave who loaned Hemingway the shovel that he used in 1948 to bury money at the site of his wounding, the symbolic gesture that Hemingway memorialized in Across the River and into the Trees. What an astounding act of detective work! Another revelatory footnote explores the mysterious "girl from Turin" that Hemingway knew during World War I and her nebulous role in the young Hemingway's life (285); it is a knowing excavation of a previously underutilized piece of information. That access to the minutiae of Hemingway's Italian world needed to be the prevailing register of the book, rather than consigned to almost apologetic footnotes.

No previous writer has ever been more authoritative about Hemingway's post-censorship publishing arrangement in Italy. Di Robilant writes expertly about Hemingway's important relationship with Mondadori, his exclusive Italian publisher--both their business and personal relationship. Hemingway's relationship with Mondadori was also leveraged to great effect for Ivancich, too, leading to her providing the illustrations for the book covers of Across the River and into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea. Mondadori also published Ivancich's book of poems in 1953. Di Robilant's commentary about Fernanda Pivano, Hemingway's exclusive Italian translator, is useful and adds granularity to the network of personal and professional relationships Hemingway maintained during his Italian sojourn.

Di Robilant is on less firm footing when it comes to analysis of Hemingway's writing. His claim, for instance, that Across the River and into the Trees is the most scrupulously edited of all Hemingway's novels is demonstrably untrue. The novel, in fact, was hurriedly finished and never subjected to any serious revision. Di Robilant asserts: "Always a careful, even obsessive editor of his own prose, he raised the bar to a new level in the case of Across the River and into the Trees, reworking each sentence, each paragraph with a maniacal attention to detail" (174). In fact, rather than being "painstaking" (174), a study of the manuscript and the galleys reveals that, unwisely, Hemingway changed comparatively little from the first draft; if in previous novels he edited in order to prune out the inessential, with Across the River and into the Trees, his tendency was to confirm the genius of his original inspiration. Hemingway was as in love with listening to his colonel pontificate as Renata was. The manuscript shows reams of unedited dialogue, much of which Hemingway apparently concluded was publishable in its original conception. If Hemingway was a maniac about anything in the writing stage, it was fastidiously recording the daily word count and then gloating in disturbingly repetitive letters to all of his correspondents about how smoothly the writing process was going and declaring how Shakespeare would be knocked on his ass when the book would eventually be published.

A book like Autumn in Venice must come armed with a thesis. What did the 48-year-old Ernest Hemingway, the most famous writer in the world, see in this Italian teenager, and what part did she play in his life, his writing, and his marriage? As the title indicates, di Robilant perpetuates the notion that Ivancich was Hemingway's "muse," a source of energy that inspired him to productivity, leading him out of the creative doldrums of the 1940s, through the purgatory of Across the River and into the Trees in 1950, and into the colossal success of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, the Pulitzer in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

However, this thesis risks being reductive: di Robilant characterizes Hemingway's state of mind by writing: "His time with Adriana had inspired him; his creative energies were flowing" (83). These repeated statements permeate the text, emphasizing di Robilant's premise: "Adriana had come into Hemingway's life in a kind of magical way. By sublimating his feelings for her, he had transformed her into his muse. The energy he felt in his writing and, indeed, in his everyday life, had flowed directly from Adriana" (94). Hemingway's romanticizing of Ivancich "energized him and made him feel good and had become necessary to him" (171). A good writing streak is dubbed Hemingway's "extraordinary Adriana-inspired seven-month run" (232). And at one point in Cuba, for Hemingway it "was hard to find inspiration for new work in the shifting, highly charged atmosphere of the revolution, with his muse no longer by his side" (295). If Ivancich was indeed his muse, the reader would expect more evidence than retro-speculative forays into Hemingway's state of mind. Such formulaic assertions simplify Hemingway's writing process and risks minimizing the complexity of the Hemingway-Ivancich relationship.

Although di Robilant's acknowledgments suggest that he did interview the survivors in Hemingway's inner circle and their heirs, he shows enormous, even excessive restraint in not making the Hemingway-Ivancich story about his own family and their friends. An anecdote about his father Carlo comforting a distraught Ivancich is a gem, an element that only this writer can provide. Di Robilant's modesty forbids him from making his family's role in the Hemingway-Ivancich relationship a major strain. To di Robilant's great credit, he includes the passage from Hemingway's son Gregory's memoirs deriding the Venetian aristocracy, which implicates his own family: "Count So-and-So usually turned out to be a no-count nothing" (qtd. 103).

In minimizing his own narrative, di Robilant has relied heavily on the personal narratives of others. He has conscientiously synthesized Mary Hemingway's unpublished Italian journal, her memoir, How it Was, Ivancich's autobiography, La Torre Bianca (not available in English), and Hemingway's unpublished letters. He coordinates these four sources to flesh out the details to support his thesis and to trace the narrative, occasionally adding works like Peter Viertel's Dangerous Friends for greater context.

Di Robilant connects the dots and follows them admirably in order to form the most coherent narrative of the Hemingway-Ivancich relationship ever written. Recent books like Terry Mort's Hemingway at War (2016) and Richard Owen's Hemingway in Italy (2017) attempt to uncover Hemingway as a war correspondent during World War II and as a rich, famous writer amongst the Italian upper crust. As with these studies, Autumn in Venice makes a genuine attempt to penetrate deeper into the writer's psyche. Di Robilant reframes the central question about the Hemingway-Ivancich relationship. It is not "did they or didn't they," but rather: "what was he thinking?"

Mark Cirino

University of Evansville

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Chestnut Hill College
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Cirino, Mark. "Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse." The Hemingway Review, vol. 38, no. 2, spring 2019, pp. 106+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A584979840/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f7a6e9a7. Accessed 27 May 2024.

QUOTE: These spellbinding photos will beguile photographers, artists, and those enamored of the glamour of a bygone era.”
Face to Face: The Photographs of Camilla McGrath

Camilla McGrath and Andrea Di Robilant. Knopf, $75 (352p) ISBN 978-0-52565-646-3

Italian journalist Di Robilant showcases the lives of the rich and famous in this spectacular collection of images from the personal archives of Italian countess Camilla McGrath (1925-2007). McGrath and her husband, Earl--at various times a screenwriter, record producer, and art curator--had an outsized social life, and the sheer number of celebrities who passed through their orbit is mind-boggling. Among the photographs are ones capturing Jackie Kennedy lounging by a pool, Andy Warhol smiling alongside his dachshund Archie, and vacation shots with Princess Margaret and Bianca Jagger. As art dealer Beatrice Monti remembers of McGrath's gift, "She was able to capture something of each one of us even in the middle of a party." Di Robilant describes these get-togethers, recalling, "Lunch was served buffet-style and was very casual--you had to grab a seat on the couch in a hurry or you'd be left standing with your plate and your wineglass. The atmosphere was convivial, lighthearted, unpretentious--it was just a cool place to hang out on a Sunday afternoon." These spellbinding photos will beguile photographers, artists, and those enamored of the glamour of a bygone era. (Oct.)

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"Face to Face: The Photographs of Camilla McGrath." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 42, 19 Oct. 2020, p. 62. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A641074311/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c11b0bf6. Accessed 27 May 2024.

QUOTE: “valuable record of glitz and glamour at play.”
di Robilant, Andrea FACE TO FACE Knopf (NonFiction None) $75.00 10, 27 ISBN: 978-0-525-65646-3

A photographer chronicles her life among the famous.

Ever since he was a student at Columbia University, di Robilant was a welcome guest at Camilla (1925-2007) and Earl McGrath’s apartment in New York City. Camilla was an old friend of his father’s. She and her husband, who owned a gallery, loved art, and she loved to photograph people. This sumptuous collection of almost 700 photos from 1948 to 1999—now housed at the New York Public Library—forms an “extraordinary collection documenting behind-the-scenes moments in the lives of well-known artists, writers and musicians.” Camilla’s family was wealthy, and her marriage to Earl—whose friends included W.H. Auden and Frank O’Hara—in 1963 was “her ticket to a more unconventional life.” These mostly black-and-white, informal snapshots, some posed, most not, may seem ordinary, but the people in them are not. The first section, “Before Earl,” includes photos of Aristotle Onassis and artist Cy Twombly, among others. In “Marlia” (so named for the Italian estate owned by Camilla’s father), we see Jacqueline Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, Princess Margaret, Nancy Pelosi, and Fran Lebowitz, who contributes some remembrances. Because Earl worked in the movie business and later at Atlantic Records with Ahmet Ertegun, their circle of famous friends grew. The “New York” section offers pictures of Leonard Bernstein with Richard Burton, Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg. Among countless other notable photos in this appealing package: Samuel Barber and Stephen Spender together; artists Richard Diebenkorn and Jasper Johns “sketching each others’ portrait”; Linda Ronstadt hugging Jerry Brown; Mick Jagger (pictured often) with Norman Mailer, Warhol, Arthur Schlesinger, and others at Jagger’s 1983 Christmas party; architects Michael Graves and Frank Gehry with interior designer Kitty Hawks; Joan Didion with Terry Southern and Jean Stein; and Ezra Pound with Buckminster Fuller in Spoleto in 1971. And the list goes on.

A valuable record of glitz and glamour at play.

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"di Robilant, Andrea: FACE TO FACE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A635239762/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=74ca154c. Accessed 27 May 2024.

QUOTE: “An erudite work that shows how one devoted scholar opened up an entire realm of knowledge.”
di Robilant, Andrea THIS EARTHLY GLOBE Knopf (NonFiction None) $30.00 6, 18 ISBN: 9780307597076

A deeply researched look at the editor and author of one of the "great publishing feats" of the 16th century.

Born in the age of discovery, Venetian scholar Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557) worked in official capacities as a minister, but he also tirelessly organized information that seeped out in the form of journals and letters of new discoveries across the globe. These accounts described Magellan's circumvention of the world, Cadamosto's journey along the West Coast of Africa, Jacques Cartier's travels in Canada, and Pizarro's conquest of the Incas in Peru. Published in three volumes from 1550 to 1559, Ramusio's Navigationi et Viaggi introduced much of the heretofore unknown geographical knowledge about three continents, covering Africa and Southeast Asia; then the New World; then Asia and the Muslim lands. In this elegant history, di Robilant, author of Irresistible North and A Venetian Affair, engagingly traces Ramusio's vast scholarship, which began with his position as an editing assistant to Aldus Manutius, the legendary Venetian publisher of the classics. Working as a clerk in the chancery, then as the secretary to the senate, Ramusio moonlighted as a geographer, helping to publish Strabo's Geography, and he was highly knowledgeable about classical scholars, who knew little of the layout of the globe. Over decades, Ramusio kept up with dramatic changes in exploration, including works by Antonio Pigafetta, one of the few to return from Magellan's venture; Muslim convert John Leo, who traveled extensively in Africa; contemporaries Ludovico di Varthema and Cazazionor, who chronicled India and Ceylon; Andrea Navagero, who left a "treasure trove of first-rate material" about the bloody excursions of the Spanish in the New World. Among other richly detailed topics, di Robilant also examines Ramusio's revisitation of Marco Polo's journal.

An erudite work that shows how one devoted scholar opened up an entire realm of knowledge.

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