Love From Venice, Gill Johnson
Love From Venice, Gill Johnson
List: $31.99 | Sale: $22.40
Club: $15.99

Love From Venice
A golden summer on the Grand Canal

Author: Gill Johnson

Narrator: Rose Akroyd

Unabridged: 9 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/18/2024

Synopsis

A charming, funny and glamorous memoir and love-story, about a summer in 1957 in Venice, working for an aristocratic Italian family.

In the summer of 1957, anxious to impress an admirer who had moved to Paris, while rebelling against her family, Gill Johnson, aged twenty-five, gave up her comfortable job at the National Gallery in London and travelled to Venice to take up a job teaching English to an aristocratic Italian family.

Love from Venice is her vivid evocation of that summer, the last hurrah of the European Grand Tour, when the international jet set lit upon the city for their fun. Johnson describes (including through original letters written to her love in Paris) her life flitting from palazzo to Lido to palazzo, and how her feelings for him grow, while she becomes absorbed into the social whirl of the super-rich.

It is a moving and witty memoir of a young woman coming to terms with her own feelings and destiny, and learning about different aspects of love from the people she meets, all set in high-season Venice in a halcyon time. By the end, Johnson discovers if the scabrous excesses of fabulous wealth can divert the course of true love.

(P)2024 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

About Gill Johnson

Born in 1932, Gill Johnson grew up in Hampstead and Selsey. Evacuated to Scotland after the fall of Dunkirk, she returned home in 1943 only narrowly to escape being hit by a Doodlebug rocket in Buckinghamshire. Leaving St Mary's Calne school, she joined the Bach Choir in 1949, and is now the choir's longest serving member. After marrying, she worked in the British Embassy in Paris, then returned to London to assist Kenneth Clark, the art historian. To fund the education of her four sons, she imported sorbet from the Rhône Valley. Having lived in the northern Auvergne, Italy and Hong Kong, she has settled in west London. Love from Venice is her first book.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kathleen on February 15, 2024

Love from Venice is Gill Johnson’s utterly fascinating memoir of the summer of 1957 which she spent in Venice caring for the two older sons of the Conte and Contessa Brandolini in their magnificent 15th century palazzo on the Grand Canal. Gill had become romantically involved with David Ross, an arc......more

Goodreads review by Kath on December 04, 2024

A fan of books by adventurous young women who decide to pick up sticks and live abroad (memorably Aussie writer, Penelope Green's 'When In Rome', 'See Naples and Die' and 'Girl by Sea'), I was intrigued by the cover of English writer's Gill Johnson's book 'Love from Venice'. Not at all like Penelope......more

Goodreads review by KeenReader on August 03, 2024

When I started this, I loved it and I thought it would be a 5 star book for me. However, roughly half way through Ms Johnson showed a rather unattractive part of her character. She was expressing how ghastly tourists were. She didn't mean the rich, famous or titled people who visited Venice, but peo......more

Goodreads review by DJ on August 21, 2024

I confess, at first I was drawn to this book by the title... Keywords Venice, Summer, Golden. The complete antithesis of this - Summer of 2024. I love books about travelling in the past , before everything became so commercialised and we all started to dress the same the world over. Places still had i......more

Goodreads review by Sheena on March 01, 2024

A fascinating glimpse into another world. Venice is one of my favourite places and somewhere I love to read about. Not sure I entirely took to Gill. I suppose she was of her time and class but still find her calling people peasants jarring. It is difficult not to come over as smug if you are telling......more

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