Hemingway Adventure (1999) by Michael Palin Read Free Book Online Page A

Franchetti, the man who can tell me more about Hemingway’s return to Italy, has agreed to see me. The address is as it should be, a palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal.
    Though it has turned cold, and there are ominous reports of the worst winter weather for a decade heading this way, the Venetian sunlight, low and strong, highlights the delicate details on the buildings as we head up the Grand Canal. I’ve always found Venice absurdly theatrical and today it’s more like a stage-set than ever. Above us, figures in eighteenth-century tricorn hats, black cloaks and snow-white face masks are crossing the Accademia Bridge. This is the first day of the two-week carnival, an ancient festival that disappeared for 200 years, before being revived in 1975. Those in full costume are, sadly, a small minority compared to those wearing anoraks, sweat pants and floppy jester hats bought outside the station.
    The palace of the Franchettis is approached via a narrow courtyard from which rises the world’s smallest elevator, which disgorges the occupant into a cramped passageway, which gives on to a long, gloomy room at the far end of which is a pair of glassed doors which open on to a huge and dazzling panorama of the Grand Canal.
    Alberto Franchetti is a slim, slope-shouldered man around my own age. The word languid could have been coined for him. He speaks softly and moves with a feline grace and an unmistakably aristocratic lack of urgency.
    I ask him what I should call him. Should it be Signor Franchetti, or perhaps Alberto? He purses his lips gently, as if acknowledging some distant, unspecific pain.
    ‘Perhaps, Barone?’ he suggests.
    After this opening skirmish he is courteous and helpful. He lights a cigarette and we stand on the balcony and talk about Venice until it’s too cold and we have to come in. The Grand Canal has changed, he says, registering distaste. Not one of the hundred or so palazzos along it is still occupied by the family who built it. It’s noisy with all the boats and the continuous activity. His mother was the last person to keep her bedroom on the Grand Canal side of the palazzo.
    Aware of the short time we have, I try to deflect him from the plight of the nobility and in the direction of Hemingway. He recalls him with faint amusement, protesting regularly that he was only ten at the time.
    Hemingway was ‘very informal, very American’, he tells me. He wore clothes that seemed marvellously exotic to a European war baby, albeit a nobleman’s son, flying-jackets and big fur-lined boots and check shirts. He would be totally at ease with the servants and throw his arms round any pretty girl in a way which was unheard-of in structured Italian society.
    ‘He drove around in a limousine. A big Buick! In that time, no one in Italy, not even Giovanni Agnelli [the head of Fiat] drove around in a limousine.’
    The Barone pauses, leans forward, extinguishes his cigarette and speaks with soft intensity.
    ‘He lived the legend, you see, he lived the legend.’
    After an hour together we not only part on Michael and Alberto terms but he has invited us to come to the last duck-shoot of the season and see for ourselves what Hemingway liked so much about this particularly Venetian activity. He impresses upon me that duck-shooting is a serious business, with rituals and traditions stretching back five centuries. Its rules and regulations are essentially feudal, rural and zealously observed. Shooting takes place at dawn but the preparations begin the night before. I am given an address, driving instructions, and warned to bring very warm clothing, and a jacket and tie. Oh, and no girlfriends, it’s male only.
    W e find ourselves driving once again across the flat, gridlike scenery east of Venice, beyond the Piave, and across the Livenza, before turning off the autostrada towards the town of Caorle on the Adriatic coast.

    Just before the town we turn into a narrow road which becomes a track which follows a network