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Billiard cue, in original box with 'Ernest Hemingway' plate, 40s
Box dimensions H 5x57x10 cm
" ... to my young friend Arnaldo, in honor of his beautiful sister Ornella ", so reads the authentic letter from E. Hemingway accompanying the billiard cue belonging to him, donated as bet to Mr. Arnaldo Zamperetti.
Sixty years after his death (2 July 1961), at the end of an adventurous, turbulent, enigmatic and intense existence, Ernest Hemingway remains one of the most influential of American literature.
In addition to the writer, as well as the journalist and war chronicler, as well as the Nobel Prize that binds him to everyone's memory, every single event of his life has been well collected and documented by numerous biographers ; the inner intolerance amplified by alcohol, the adventure in Africa as a hunter, the scars of war, the makeshift air landings, the wounds that marked him during the course of his most difficult years.
But there is also an unpublished Ernest Hemingway.
He is the man of great charm, who has collected four wives and an unknown number of romantic relationships.
He is the Hemingway suitor and lover, sensitive to female beauty, who in 1948 clashed with Antonio De Curtis , our Totò, in Stresa, for the much contested verdict of Miss Italy. < br>
The most representative tragicomic mask in Italy was part of the jury of the Beauty Contest that cheered the post-war years on the banks of the Verbano.
At the Regina Palace Hotel, the aesthetic canons of a femininity that no longer exists: between chaste bikinis and soft sizes, the Triestine Fulvia Franco won that edition : 1 meter and 66 centimeters per sixty kilos of beauty, the advantage linked to belonging to a city on the border with Yugoslavia which has become "free territory" and the political endorsement of an Italy to be rebuilt .
Hemingway had landed the day before in Genoa and chose to go there, for an amarcord journey through the rooms of Des Iles Borromées, where he had set some of the pages of “Addio to arms ”, inspired by his military experience in Italy.
It was he who, on the evening before the final of the Competition, decided to bet on the Bolognese Ornella Zamperetti, who then came second among controversies, legal disputes and filed claims for compensation.
In the billiard room of his hotel, between spirits and carom games, after betting on the microphones of journalists, the North American writer put his billiard cue into play with the brother of the aspiring Miss Italy, the one that had accompanied him throughout his youth, but betting everything on the losing choice. This event is also mentioned in the pages of Andrea Di Robilant's book: “Autumn in Venice. Hemingway and the last muse " ( Corbaccio publisher ).
Bibliography:
the manuscript comes with a calligraphic appraisal drawn up by the judicial graphologist enrolled in the register of the Court of Catania, Dr. Valentina Mavica.
The lot got the interest of many newspapers and magazines.
View the review
the manuscript comes with a calligraphic appraisal drawn up by the judicial graphologist enrolled in the register of the Court of Catania, Dr. Valentina Mavica.
The lot got the interest of many newspapers and magazines.
View the review
€ 35.000,00
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