Who likes the feeling of sand in their sneakers? Nobody does, and it is definitely the downside of having a beach holiday as I recently had in Lignano, a beach town at the Adriatic Sea. Lignano is known for one thing, and that is a sentence uttered by the famous writer Hemingway: Lignano is the Miami of Italy. Or more correct: 'But this is Florida, it is actually the Italian Florida!'
Lignano has capitalised this sentence at its best. Not only are its cafes and ice cream stores named Central Park and Gelateria Slurp but it also has a Hemingway award, a Hemingway Park, and (I guess) a Hemingway street, and probably many other things called after Hemingway.
Based on this, I always assumed Hemingway resided for at least a few months in Lignano while writing a novel. I now found out that he stayed only for a couple of hours. There is a photo that shows him shaking the sand out of his shoes while he looks a tad irritated (obviously). At that time, 1954, Lignano was still being built and Hemingway's hosts, the Kechler family, gave him a piece of land to build a house. Hemingway accepted the present but never returned.
This story is very much Hemingway, as he excelled in the short format. But it also proofs that one doesn't have to do something for a long time to make an impact. A pop-up exhibition, a one-day band, eine Stippvisite, ...