Writers and Friuli-Venezia Giulia

While other regions of Italy have given us great painters or musicians, this one has been fertile soil for writers, both native and foreign. Rainer Maria Rilke experienced great happiness in Duino, just outside Trieste. Kafka was a visitor in 1913. Ernest Hemingway saw action during World War I and was badly injured. His book, A Farewell to Arms, is set in Friuli and the neighboring Veneto and is one of the most stirring evocations of what war really is about. His description of Gertrude Stein in A Moveable Feast as having “a Friulian face” was a compliment, despite our received image of Stein’s appearance, because Hemingway was very taken with the region’s formidable women. He returned later in his life, vacationing in a villa in the Bassa Friulana.