San Michele al Tagliamento (Veneto, Italy): Hemingway, his love for Adriana and the Venetian Villa Ivancich
In the tiny village of San Michele al Tagliamento, lost in the middle of nowhere in the Italian Veneto region countryside, an hour drive from Venice, there is a Venetian villa: Villa Mocenigo-Ivancich. It is a Venetian villa like no other as it was the set for the tormented love relationship between the famous American writer, Ernest Hemingway, and what became his literary muse, the 18-yearl old noble Venetian, Adriana Ivancich. It was a life-long love story between them with a tragic end which was descrived in disguise by Hemingway in his novel "Across the river and into the trees".
The link between Ernest Hemingway and the Italian Veneto region is quite well known in literature as he often described the areas in the province of Venice in many of his famous books. He actually had come to Italy when he was young during the First World War, and later in life, when he was fifty, in the summer 1948 he actually returned to visit the places where he had volunteerd as an ambulance driver during the Great War.
Once he arrived in Italy Hemingway and his wife, attended the High Society of Venice and Cortina in the Dolomites, and came into contact with all the Venetian nobility, including the one who became his great friend, Federico Kerchler. They shared a passion for hunting and the writer was invited by another noble, Titti Franchetti Nanuk to his hunting estate in Latisana near the river Tagliamento, about 1 hour east of Venice.
"I am an old fanatic of the Veneto," he wrote to Bernard Berenson, the American art historian, and woild rather visit this area whilst refusing invitations to Florence. "I'm a boy from the Lower Piave river," he said to those who asked him why he wanted to explore the insignificant embankment of the Piave in the Venetian hinterland plain.
During one of the duck hunting session Hemingway met Adriana Ivancich and he declared that she struck him like a lightning. There is a great literary debate (scandalous at the time) whether between Hemingway and the very young noble Adriana Ivancich there was a true love story or just an elective affinity since she too was a writer.
Ivana's family, the Ivancichs, originally came from Dalmatia from a powerful family of shipowners who made their fortune with trades in Venice. From that first meeting during the hunting expedition, the two regularly visited each other, either because Hemingway stayed for a long time in Veneto, or because he had started writing his novel: "Across the river and into the trees".
The book painted exactly his life in the Venetian area during the war where he had been wounded by an Austrian grenade in 1918, and his fiery passion for Ivana Ivancich. Behind the fiction character of Renata in the book there was in fact Adriana.
Adriana Ivancich was full of life and enthusiasm that was contagious for Hemingway to the point that that his literary vein that had dried out started to flow again: Adriana managed to transfer her energy to Ernest. He had managed to write the book because of her.
Adriana was a quite special young girl: an aristocrat, a Countess, who was fatherless and had a passion for writing and drawing. She had a prominent nose, pitch black hair and deep eyes. No wonder he developed a sort of fixation for her and called her his "black horse". He gave her as a gift his typewriter
Gossip started to spread when he came back to Venice again in 1950 to visit Adriana and even back in Cuba he would not stop writing love letters to her. His marriage with the journalist Mary Welsh was put under serious strain and possibly he thought about marrying Adriana who was more than 30 years younger. However, they never did. Whether she loved him as well and was prepared to be with him, it is hard to say.
When the book "Across the river and into the trees" was published, Hemingway forbade the publication in Italy to protect Adriana: the love and erotic scenes described in some pages would have destroyed her reputation. However, the character of Renata and Adriana are overlapping: both are very young, both live in a palazzo in Venice, and both own a villa in the Venetian countryside near Latisana.
Hemingway described in the book the willows and trees that surrounded Villa Ivancich in San Michele al Tagliamento together with the bombings that had affected the Ivancich estate during the War. Colonel Cantwell, his alter ego in the book, was also inspired by a young girl whom he had fallen in love with.
Adriana and his family stayed in Cuba at the Hemingways and that made the situation even worse. When she returned to Venice, they kept on writing many love letters: there are almost 100 letters addressed to Adriana which are now in the Library of the University of Texas in Austin and in the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. He sent his last letter to Adriana in September 1955.
She never replied back.
Hemingway shot himself in July 1961. His funeral was attended by Adriana's brother, Gianfranco Ivancich which who had been also very close to the writer and who had lived in Cuba at Finca Vigia for many years.
She married unhappily to marry again later. She also wrote a book of poetry and "The White Tower", the story of their relationship and her autobiography, sold their letters at Christie's but never got rid of the heavy burden of memories attached to Hemingway.
She also killed herself in 1983, twenty years later than Hemingway's suicide: a common sad fate.
The set of this tormented love story was Villa Adriana, also called Villa Mocenigo-Biaggini-Ivancich from the names of the previous owners. The peculiarity of Villa Adriana is that ... the Villa is actually no longer there as it was bombed during the World Wars. Even the Ivancich family, the third owners of the Villam lived in the side buildings that you can still see today, the two barchesse.
There is also a huge building now used as a wine cellar, just outside the fenced gardens where the Villa was. What today is the wine cellar it used to be the field hospital during the Wars and the red writing still partly shown on the external was is a testimony of that time. In the building more than 400 soldiers were hospitalized from the war front not far from there, around San Michele al Tagliamento.
From the villa gate you can see the garden path that leads to the clearing with very tall trees where the Villa was located and which overlooked the main road that separated and still separates the property from the Tagliamento river. On the river it overlooked a small private harbor where the owners would dock their boat.
All around the Villa owners had land. This Villa was a typical Venetian villa which, as an architectural structure, was born at the end of the 15th century because of the new needs of the rich Venetians for investments, and also because at the time the sea trade was no longer booming both for the discovery of the Americas and for the discovery of new routes of navigation.
Venetians had no longer a dominant role in the Mediterranean due to the continuous struggles with the Turks. The Venetians started investing in land and building their villas which were no longer just residential villas but were also to farms. The side barchesse of Villa Ivancich were used precisely to shelter the farm staff and equipment.
The Villa was built in the late 1500s and had a Sansovinian style balustrade and a three-light window called Serliana by the Venetian architect Serlio who invented it with the central arched opening, and the two lateral trabeations. Villa Ivancich had three floors: the kitchen for the servants on the ground floor, while the family lived on the main floor. Another reference to the city of Venice was the fact that the main door was facing the river while the secondary gate was facing the fields, a testimony of Venice customs.
In fact, the architect who invented the Venetian villa-style, Palladio said that the Venetian villa had to be beautiful but also functional at the same time. In 1600 the barchesse of Villa Ivancich were built at a distance from the central villa because they were buildings dedicated to work.
The two barchesse face each other: they have seven arches divided by Doric columns with particular architraves built by bands, and above the grotesque figures made up of the snouts of lions, the trunks of elephants or the wings of dragons. The frame at the top is notched. Above each arch there is an oval opening with a cartouche frame. Above grain was stored.
In the northern barchessa there were the stables, the servants' quarters and the silkworm workshops. The southern barchessa was used as a cellar for the wines produced in their fields and above the granary stored the goods produced in their fields. With the Second World War and the destruction of the Villa, the cellar was moved where the granary was located.
Although there is no archival documentation, according to a centuries-old tradition the two barchesse are attributed to the architect Baldassare Longhena.
In the façade of the barchesse you can still see the grenade holes of the Second World War.
Originally the Villa belonged to the powerful Mocenigo family until 1800 when the property was bought by a Paduan entrepreneur, Vincenzo Biaggini, who brought the electricity to the town of San Michele and went down well with the servants because he helped the people of the town. A daughter of Biggini married Carlo Ivancich who lived in Venice but was originally from Dalmatia. And from that momento the Villa took the name of Villa Ivancich.
In the gardens there is still the noble chapel of the Villa which is dedicated to San Giuseppe because it kept a precious altarpiece until 1913 which represented the saint's death, painted by one of the Guardi brothers among the greatest landscape painters of the Venetian eighteenth century. Carlo Ivancich sold it to the German merchants and today it can be admired in Berlin at the StadtMuseum.
In the chapel the altarpiece by Guardi was replaced by a painting by Francesca Ivancich who asked her sister Adriana Ivancich to pose as a model for the face of Sant'Agata, from here we have a portrait of Adriana. The destroyed villa is represented in the painting. The chapel was damaged by the war bombing and in 1976 by the earthquake and has fallen into disuse.
In Villa Ivancich, among these buildings and these gardens, Hemingway met the beautiful baroness Adriana Ivancich, with whom he had a brief but significant relationship, which led to the publication of "Across the river and among the trees" in 1950.
More than the story of an impossible love, "Across the river and among the trees" represented for the writer a way to impress forever on paper his memory of the past, the memory of the last illusions of a beautiful season of his life .
In the book his "slow body" lives for a moment again the soft body of Renata-Adriana, perhaps the mirror of what had actually happened with the noble woman. We will never know.
When I left Villa Ivancich with its fascinating history: I imagined the last time Hemingway and Adriana said goodbye. All their intimate and private world expressed in the beauty of this place suspended in time, and of a villa that no longer exists.
IN BRIEF
Getting to Villa Ivancich, San Michele al Tagliamento (Italy)
Visiting Villa Ivancich
Contact the municipality of San Michele al Tagliamento for guided tours and visits. Here.
Want to know about Adriana Ivancich?
If you want to have more info about Adriana Ivancich, here.
What to read for free "Across the river and into the trees" by Hemingway?
Click here.
Learn more about the film "Across the river and into the trees".
Click here.