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One of the most wrenching and scandalous love stories in all of literary biography, the author finely details the last productive years of Ernest Hemingway in a kaleidoscopic succession of relationships, passions, trips, editorial disputes, drinking binges and his contradictory nature set against the backdrop of northeast Italy. It is the remarkable story of his love affair with the city of Venice and the muse he found there. In the autumn of 1948, Hemingway was approaching the age of 50 and had not published a novel in nearly a decade. He travelled for the first time to Venice and there met and fell in love with a striking young woman named Adriana Ivancich. What followed was a platonic love affair. He continued to visit her in Venice and she in turn came to Cuba while he wrote 'The Old Man and the Sea'. This illuminating story examines the cost to a young woman of her relationship with a literary celebrity, and takes an intimate look at the fractured heart and changing art of Hemingway's secret desires, successes and depressive obstacles. 348pp in illustrated paperback.