• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 12 / 09 / 2010

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2010.12.08 - 11:39:18 / [email protected]. HAVANA, CUBA.-  Italian painter Franco Azzinari will inaugurate on December 10 the exhibition “Buscando a Hemingway” (Looking for Hemingway) at Finca Vigía, the place where the great writer, known as the Bronze God of American Literature, lived in Cuba.

Azzinari, who declares himself to be in love with Cuba, its culture and its people, has visited the island 59 times since 1992 and has made some 200 paintings linked to his experiences in this land.

He said that when he visited Finca Vigía and met Cojimar’s fishermen, some of whom met Ernest Hemingway, he became inspired and made portraits of them, the places related to the US intellectual, and the flamboyant trees he admired so much.

The exhibition “Buscando a Hemingway” will be opened at the tower of Finca Vigía until June 19, 2011, the closing day of the 13th International Colloquium dedicated to the life and work of the author of the novel The Old Man and the Sea.

He said he has already received proposals to exhibit these pieces in several universities and plans to bring the topic of Hemingway and Cuba to many centers for higher studies in the world.

Azzinari specified that he didn’t meet the 1953 Nobel Literature Prize winner personally, but that he was a friend of Gregorio Fuentes, the skipper of his yacht El Pilar, who was very close to the notable writer.

He also visited the places in which Hemingway used to fish marlins and swordfish in Havana, as well as Kenya, in Africa, where contacted members of the masai tribe that participated in the hunting safaris organized by the writer.

With respect to his artistic work, he declared that he has never worked for money and that he keeps most of his pieces, many of which are located in a personal museum that exists in the city of Calabria, following an initiative of the municipal administration of Altomonte in Cosenza.   

Source: ACN