Hemingway In Italy

Product Description

Ernest Hemingway is most often associated with Spain, Cuba, & Florida, but Italy was equally important in his life & work. This book, the first on the subject, explores Hemingway s visits throughout his life to such places as Sicily, Genoa, Rapallo, Cortina, & Venice. Richard Owen describes how Hemingway first visited Italy during World War I, an experience that set the scene for A Farewell to Arms. The writer then returned after World War II, where he would find inspiration for Across the River & into the Trees. When Men without Women was published, some reviewers declared Hemingway to be at heart a reporter preoccupied with bullfighters, soldiers, prostitutes, & hard drinkers, but their claims failed to note that he also wrote sensitively & passionately about love & loss against an Italian backdrop. Owen highlights the significance of Italy in the writer s life. On the night he shot himself in July 1961, for example, Hemingway sang a song he had once learned in Cortina d Ampezzo. Hemingway returned to Italy again & again, & the places he visited or used as inspiration for his work are many. At the same time, the inspiration goes both ways: Owen describes how the fifteenth century villa Ca Erizzo at Bassano del Grappa, where the American Red Cross ambulances were stationed, is now a museum devoted to the writer & World War I. Showing how the Italian landscape, from the Venetian lagoon to the Dolomites & beyond, deeply affected one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Hemingway in Italy demonstrates that this country belongs alongside Spain as a key influence on his writing & why the Italian themselves took Hemingway & his writing to heart. ”