The Piave river at Fossalta. The Italian positions were on the left bank, Austrian on the right, when battle began at midnight on 8 July 1918.
Hemingway borrowed a bicycle to take him up to the front line. He would have travelled roads like these.
Redipuglia. Mussolini made sure the First World War dead would not be forgotten with a memorial that takes up an entire hillside. The memorial commemorates over a hundred thousand Italians killed on the Eastern front in the First World War.
Venice carnival in full swing in St Mark’s Square. Masks traditionally disguise social differences and serious celebrants order theirs a year early. In 1646 diarist John Evelyn described it as ‘folly and madness’.
The Old Man and the Mask.
Barone Alberto Franchetti looking out from his family palazzo on the Grand Canal, where parking is a problem at carnival time.
Duck-shooting in the marshes east of Venice. Clear skies and frozen water as we leave the hunting lodge at first light. Later in a barrel with the Barone. Most ducks ignored us.
A farmhouse in the flatlands of the Piave valley at Fossalta.
Paris
An apartment near the rue Mouffetard was Ernest and Hadley Hemingway’s first real home in Paris in 1922.
Hemingway’s passport.
The Lost Generation: Hemingway and the circle of ex-pat friends he immortalised in The Sun Also Rises.
Climbing the stairs to Hemingway’s first apartment.
Cezanne, another great influence on Hemingway’s writing.
Shakespeare and Company, Valhalla for book lovers. George Whitman believes in total literary immersion, including sleeping accommodation amongst the shelves, Sunday tea and Christmas Day opening.
La Closerie des Lilas was one of Hemingway’s favourite places to drink and write.
In the ring at a local gymnasium.
Hemingway, wounded by a falling skylight, left Paris in 1928 but returned to ‘the city I love best in all the world’ when it was liberated from the Germans in 1944.
Fifty-five years later, I storm up to the Arc de Triomphe in a Second World War American tank.
After being stopped by the gendarmes, unable to start again. Film crew try the impossible, pushstarting a tank.
SPAIN
The calm before the storm. Pause for reflection at the Hotel La Perla, with bulls who’ve already run their course.
Bulls enter the Calle Estafeta, as I watch from the balcony of the room used by Hemingway in the 1920s.
The Pamplona squeeze. Huge, soggy crowd cheers the start of an eight-day party.
A bull gets his man.
In Madrid, football supporters don’t care too much about the Hemingway connection.
Apprentice plays bull as I learn, far too late in life, to wield the muleta and strut like a matador.
Valencia’s Fallas Festival. Papier mache model of Spielberg looms over the Titanic and assorted Oscars.
Fallas processions.
Bullfighter Vicente Barrera is a trained lawyer and as clean-cut as a choirboy. Difficult to square his appearance with the fact that he kills over two hundred bulls a year.
Every day at two o’clock a crowd engulfs Valencia’s main square to be blasted by the mighty explosive event they call Mascleta.
At the corrida (the bullfight) in Valencia. Vicente Barrera, bedecked in traje de luces, his suit of lights, completes a pass.
All that’s left of a year’s painstaking design and construction.
King of the Fallas - a fifty-foot-high model of Gulliver is the last of the city’s effigies to be torched.
Surreal moment. Gulliver has gone, but some of his companions have missed the flames.
KEY WEST
Marlin, the best game fish in the world, drew Hemingway to Key West.
Period postcard of the railroad which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1935.
Modern tourist development. Mallory Square, Key West.
Seven Mile Bridge carries the Overseas Highway through the coral islands of the Florida Keys.
The newest Sloppy Joe’s celebrates Hemingway’s 100th anniversary.
Extra large security measures inside Sloppy Joe’s.
Shine Forbes, the man who slugged Hemingway and lived to tell the tale, shows me some of Hemingway’s tricks.
Shine’s front room, an Aladdin’s cave collected over eighty-three years.
Bill Clinton the seventoed cat at the Hemingway house.
Local aficionado at the Hemingway Look-Alike competition.
The men who would be Ernest. Kevin the cop (top row, extreme left) and the Look-Alike class of ‘99. Winner gets to wear a medal inscribed ‘In Papa We Trust’. The winner was local boy ‘Big Rick’ Kirvan, bottom row extreme right.
Schmoozing with the judges.
AFRICA
Big game drew Hemingway to Africa in the 1930s.
His old stamping ground is now Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Seeing game on foot is not an option for most tourists, but it was the way Hemingway preferred to do it. Thanks to my trusty escorts, Ali in the cap and Jackson in the Masai robe, I see more than most visitors to these plains.
The green hills of Africa - wooded slopes of the Chyulu Hills as seen from Ol Donyo Wuas. In the distance, a panorama of dry plains, dust rising from an approaching vehicle. Somewhere beyond that lurks the tallest mountain in Africa.