SOLD:Italy

‘Sometimes I think we only half live over here. The Italians live all the way’, Hemingway wrote to his sister in 1919, shortly after his arrival in the Veneto as an 18-year-old, the driver of a Red Cross ambulance. Italy was to become the setting for many significant events in his life and inspire some of his most extraordinary literary achievements. Here Hemingway would have his first brushes with death, love, war and adventure, experiences that would one day shape his novel A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway returned to Italy many times, as a foreign correspondent and to explore the beauty of the Italian landscape anew. From Rapallo to Pisa, the Ventian lagoon to the Dolomites, Siena, Florence, Sicily and Liguria, these adventures would yield his sardonic sketches ‘Italy 1927’ and worthy additions to The Nick Adams Stories. The events of a winter spent in Cortina in 1948 would become the basis for the love
story of the aging Colonel Richard Cantwell in Across the River and Into the Trees. Richard Owen explores the undeniably deep impact of the Italian landscape and its people on the great author’s life and works.

Richard Owen is the former Italy correspondent of The Times and the author of Lady Chatterley’s Villa: DH Lawrence on the Italian Riviera (Haus, 2014).