Venice for Lovers

By Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein

Each year of their 30-year marriage, Louis Begley, the award-winning author of Wartime Lies, and his wife Anka Muhlstein have spent long, enjoyable months in Venice. They write and live there and over the decades La Serenissima has become their second home.

The owners of their favourite restaurants have become their friends and they share the lives of the locals, far off the well-trodden tourist track. Begley tells the story of how he fell in love with and in Venice, though as he makes clear when writing on Venice’s pivitol role in world literature, he was not the only one − Henry James, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann are only three of his most illustrious predecessors.

Louis Begley was born in Poland in 1933. He became famous for his novel Wartime Lies, which won the PEN/ Hemingway Award in 1991. His novel About Schmidt was adapted into a film of the same name starring Jack Nicholson. Anka Muhlstein is a celebrated biographer and historian. She was awarded the Goncourt Prize in 1996 for her biography of Custine. She is the author of Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, The Perils of Marriage and Balzac’s Omelette (p.4)

Translated by Anne Wyburd

'Definitely worth slipping into your luggage while you're away' - The Times