Ernest Hemingway, his Venice on pictures.
An interesting photographic exhibition, ‘The Veneto of Ernest Hemingway’, which traces the link between the famous writer and Venice, the lagoon and its hinterland, will remain open until May 15th, 2011 at Palazzo Loredan, Veneto Institute of Sciences, Literature and Arts.
The exhibition, where admission is free, opened in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the celebrated writer and brings together previously unseen photographs taken by Hemingway of the places most dear to him in the Veneto – amongst these are Caorle, Venezia, Verona and the Valpolicella. It is promoted by the International University of Venice, S. Servolo and sponsored by the Veneto Region.
Ernest Hemingway came to the Veneto region for the first time in May 1918, where he was severely injured on the Italian front somewhere between Schio, Pasubio and Fossalta di Piave during the Great war. It is not a coincidence that the protagonist of the novel ‘A Farewell to Arms’ is an American soldier on the Italian front. In 1948 he returned to the Veneto with his wife Mary to revisit the places of war. He went to Cortina d’Ampezzo, where he met for the first time Fernanda Pivano, the Italian translator of his novels, then to Venice where he made famous Harry’s Bar and Hotel Cipriani di Torcello. Finally, he also spent time in Caorle where he used to go hunting in the valley of S. Gaetano.
Again he travelled between Venice and Cortina in two trips: initially in 1950, when he completed ‘Across the River and Into the Trees’, another novel with clear autobiographical elements, and then in 1954. The latter tells the story of Richard Cantwell, a retired American colonel returned to Italy to retrace the places where he was wounded in his youth, and also tells of his troubled relationship with a nineteen year old Italian countess. Hemingway himself was also at the time the protagonist of a scandalous affair with Adriana Ivancich, a young aristocrat who in 1980 would publish the memoir, ‘The White Tower’, in which memories would be interwoven threw the pages of literature.
