Nina Auzias and Leo Stein from Montparnasse to Settignano

Alessandra Marchetti and Patricia Osmond with Michele Amedei ISBN: 9788870385908 pp. 32, ill. b/n 4, col. 5 brossura con bandelle year 2024 price: € 12
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The fourth book in the series introduces us to the life, related here for the first time, of Nina Auzias, a street singer in Montparnasse, who in 1914 joined her lover Leo Stein in Settignano to begin a long and troubled relationship with the man she passionately loved. From Villa Doccia, where Leo, after the break with his sister Gertrude, had brought his fabulous collection of Renoirs and Cézannes, we follow them to Villino Rosa, where they established themselves after their marriage in 1921, and then to Villa del Rossellino, their refuge during the terrible years of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Settignano. We meet other expatriates whom the couple frequented on the hills of Florence — Mary and Bernard Berenson, Ned and Peggy Bruce, Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce — and noted Italian and foreign artists. And finally, we accompany them through the last years of the 1940s, suffering physically and economically, but bound to one another by what they both felt was a strange and inexplicable destiny, until Nina, alone after the death of her beloved "Steiney" can no longer bear her grief and solitude.

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