who dedicated herself to the writer during his stay in the manor house. Hemingway dedicated to the lagoon of Caorle some of the most beautiful pages of his book "Beyond the river and among the trees ", published for the first time in America in 1950 and Italy in 1965 from the Mondadori Publisher. And it is on the tracks of the writer that Caorle has meant to celebrate him with the opening of the hunting house "Valle Grande", for the first time to the public on 21 July 1999, and in the evening with a concert in the manor house together with the testimonies of who has known him during his stay in San Gaetano and Caorle.
We are in San Gaetano di Caorle, a little town near Caorle, and here starts our journey on the tracks of Ernest Hemingway, celebrated from the city of Caorle on his centenary. In fact he was born on 21 July 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, and his parents were Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall, who studied to became a contralto but gave up her career because of sight troubles. He went to San Gaetano for the first time in the winter of 1948, with Baron Raimondo Nanuk Franchetti, bound to him from the passion for hunting and from a close friendship. When he arrived to San Gaetano with his wife Mary, he usually slept in separate rooms in the manor house. The servants say because double beds were too much small, instead, other malignants say that he had difficult husband-and-wife relationships. The manor house was the house where the nobility friend of Franchetti went to hunt and where the guests arrived with their wives, who staied there because women couldn't stay in house in "Valle Grande", during the hunting. The manor house goes back to the 1600 and was rebuilt around 1873, when the San Gaetano village is risen, bilt from the Franchetti's, the last peninsular inhabited strip of land before the great lagoon, or rather, before the great lake that separates the island of Caorle from San Gaetano. The revolving bridge was bilt around 1882.
The buildings of San Gaetano are made of bricks, which come from Padua. Near the manor house there are two tombstones of the Franchetti's: on the right side, Raimondo, called "the old one" and on the left side, the Raimondo grandson. The one on the left side has been inaugurated from the duke Amedeo d'Aosta, Raimondo Nanuk's godfather. The Franchetti family has more than 300 years and Abramo Franchetti was one of the meritorious pioneers of the reclamation of the Maremma and of Caorle, and, moreover, he was also the constructor of the first italian railway lines. According to the decree of 17 October 1858, he was maden a baron by the king Vittorio Emanuele. In the reclamation work of San Gaetano 60 km of channels had been dug to drain waters for agriculture. Raimondo, the pioneer of San Gaetano, married the austrian baroness Luisa Rothschild and they gave birth to their son Alberto, a famous musician. His son Raimondo organized and was at the head of many explorations in Africa and the most famous one was that in Dancalia (Ethiopia). He was also close friend of the Negus Ailè Salassiè. His son Raimondo Nanuk Franchetti, cited in the book "Beyond the river and among the trees " as baron Alvarito, is the close friend of Ernest Hemingway and, thanks to him, the writer attended Venice, Cortina and Caorle. Hemingway has always felt a particular fascination for Caorle, in fact from 1948 in then he has often attended San Gaetano and the lagoon, loving them with the heart and showing that love, not only dedicating some pages of his book "Beyond the river and among the trees ", (published in 1950 in America and 1965 in Italy), but also living in first person the emotions and the feelings of a natural atmosphere that only this lagoon evokes and that today makes us living them all. Now we enter in the "Valle Grande", in the great lagoon where Hemingway staied during his hunting. The lagoon of Caorle has an extension of approximately 6000 hectares and is one of the most bewitched and beautiful natural places of Italy and is from here that Hemingway drew inspiration to write the novel "Beyond the river and among the trees " and so he had written:

""Four boats sailed up the main channel towards the great lagoon on the north... Dawn was breaking before we reached the barrel made of oak staves, which was soaked in the middle of the lagoon... The hunter... went down in the barrel and the boatman gave him two guns... At that moment there were more light, and the hunter succeeded to see the low outline of the land beyond the lagoon... beyond it there were again marsh and at the end of it there were the sea... He watched the sky brighten beyond the long border of the marsh and saw the mountains covered with snow. The colonel heard a shot behind his shoulders where he knew there were any hide and turned his head to watch the far-away beach covered with sedge, beyond the frozen lagoon."

E.Hemingway