The exhibition is open from 2 April to 15 May.
Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti
Loredan Palace, Campo Santo Stefano – Venice.

“I’m an old Veneto’s fanatic”. That is what Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter to Bernard Berenson in 1948 expressing all his affection for Veneto. His love started in the spring of 1918 when, as a volunteer for the American Red Cross (ARC), he used to go on the Fiat ambulance from Schio at the foot of Pasubio in order to aid the wounded soldiers. However, forced to long pauses in that city, he got bored. For this reason, he went to the Piave front, to Fossalta, at the beginning of July to provide Italian soldiers with cigarettes and chocolate. That lasted few days because, on the evening of 8th July, some mortar shell splinters hit him on many parts of his body. At the ARC American hospital in Milan, where he was hospitalised, he met the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky who then would have become Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.

On September 1948 Hemingway with his fourth wife, Mary, left Cuba to come back to Italy to see again the places of the war. From Genoa he reached, by his convertible Buick, Cortina where he had already been in 1923 led by his extraordinary nose for delightful and still unknown places. There he met the great landowner Federico Kechler who then invited him to visit his residences in Friuli and put him in contact with Franchetti and Ivancich, both Venetian aristocrats. At the beginning of October, while Fernanda Pivano was translating A Farewell to Arms, she received a postcard: “I’m in Cortina and I would like to meet you” by Hemingway. She could not believe to that and she threw away the postcard, saying: “What arsehole! What kind of joke is that?” After a week, Hemingway turned up again: “If you do not want to come to Cortina, then I will come to Turin, because I really need to talk with you”. (He was interested in knowing about her arrest by the Nazi because, at the end of the war, they had found, at the Einaudi publishing house, her translation contract for A Farewell to Arms which was considered by fascism a defeatist work. Therefore, she rushed to the Turin’s rail station, in trance, early in the morning. On 10th October at 10 o’clock p.m., she arrived at the hotel Concordia, in Cortina. However, when she saw Hemingway at the table she “was overcome with the emotion (…) the first words he said me were tell me about the Nazi”.

In the same period, Hemingway went to Fossalta di Piave to see one more time the place where he had been wounded and to show them to Fernanda Pivano.

On 30th October Ernest, Mary and Fernanda went to Venice by the Buick. During his visit to Venice he did not overlook to go to the Rialto Market. In the exhibition there are three photos of this moment: one shows Hemingway looking close at the fish, another shows him asking the fishes’ names to the fishmonger, and the last one show him interviewing the fishmonger Dante Deste Widmann, survivor from the Russia campaign, just about this tragic military experience. According to Hemingway, this market was “the most similar thing to a nice museum like Prado or the Accademia in this moment”. From the market, he went up the Big Channel by gondola until the Gritti. Since the gondoliers had had difficulty, he paid them “what they deserved and a little more”. At the beginning of November, he discovered the Cipriani inn in Torcello, where he moved with Mary. That was one of the happiest moments of his life. He started to go hunting duck in the San Gaetano valley (Caorle lagoon), property of the baron Nanuk Franchetti; there he wrote the most touching description of the Veneto’s lagoon that American writers have ever written. There, at the beginning of December, he met the 19-years-old Adriana Ivancich who then would have become scandalously the inspiration and the protagonist (Renata) of Across the river and into the trees, as the great-aunt Yole Biaggini Moschini inspired the character of Jeanne Dessalle to Fogazzaro in the novel Little Modern World.

The love story between the young Adriana and the elderly Ernest (he was 49 years old) caused a big scandal. However, it is probably true what the Adriana’s brother affirmed that the love between his sister and Hemingway had been only platonic. Indeed, in those years, the alcohol started to show its effects on the body and on the mind of the American writer (he extended to drinking two or three bottles of whisky per day). Even his sexual life had become precarious, as his wife Mary declared. Therefore, Hemingway started to court young and very young women calling them “daughters”.

Since the Hemingway’s life has been an eternal holyday, one hunting ended, it was the moment of skiing: during the first half of December, Mary rent Villa Aprile in Cortina, more exactly in Doneà. Once winter ended, Ernest came back to Venice, at the Gritti hotel. In this period, he said to his friends to come in Veneto because “here people know how to live”.

Again, he travelled to Venice in 1950 and for the last time in 1954, always meeting Adriana: on April of that year, he wrote: “I love you so much and I will love you forever”.

In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

He never forgot Venice and Veneto, not even the night of suicide in his house of Ketchum, Idaho. After his death, Mary said: “that night on 1 July 1961 was so quiet and peaceful! We even sang that old song we had learned in Cortina d’Ampezzo: ‘Tutti mi chiamano bionda/ ma bionda non lo sono/ porto i capelli neri’ [‘Everybody calls me blond/ but I’m not blond/ I have black hairs’]. Then we remembered Venice, the Gritti hotel, the great party Ernest gave for his friends coming from all around the world just to greet him and to shake hands with him. We thought to the old Adamo, to Kechler count and to dear Adriana”. Adriana too put in the same way an end to her life killing herself 22 years after in her house in Orbetello.