Your cue to own a bit of Hemingway history
Writer’s treasured possession, lost in a bet over a Miss Italy beauty pageant, is up for auction
A BILLIARD cue that was lost by Ernest Hemingway in a bet over the outcome of a Miss Italy beauty contest is to be sold at auction.
The American writer was staying in a grand hotel on the shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy in 1948 when he wagered the collapsible cue, one of his most prized possessions.
The piece has a reserve price of €35,000 (£29,000) and will be put up for auction in Catania in Sicily next month.
While drinking at the bar of the Hotel Des Iles Borromées in the town of Stresa, Hemingway met Arnaldo Zamperetti, whose sister Ornella was about to take part in the Miss Italy competition the following evening.
The two immediately bonded, trading war stories – Mr Zamperetti had been in the Italian army and was a veteran of the Battle of El Alamein.
The American author commented on the sister’s good looks and said he was sure she would win.
The brother disagreed, saying that he thought the contest would be won by a model called Fulvia Franco.
He said that there were political reasons behind her likely victory – she was from the city of Trieste, which was declared a free territory administered by the Allies at the end of the Second World War but which Italy was keen to reclaim. Hemingway challenged the brother to a bet, saying that the loser would have to pick up their hefty bar tab.
He then threw in the billiard cue for good measure.
In the end, it was Ms Franco who won the competition, which was held at the nearby Regina Palace Hotel, and Hemingway had to give up his cue, which came in a case inscribed with his name. He also wrote a note: “To my young friend Arnaldo, in honour of his very beautiful sister Ornella.”
Mr Zamperetti treasured the billiard cue until his death. It is his son, Aldo, who has decided to sell it at auction.
“My father accompanied his sister Ornella to Stresa for the competition,” Aldo Zamperetti said yesterday.
“Hemingway passed the evening between the billiard table and the bar of the Hotel Des Iles Borromées, where my dad was staying.
“My father was a veteran of the battles of El Alamein and the Kasserine Pass in North Africa and took part in a 3,000km retreat into the desert with a tribe of Tuareg nomads. So he had plenty to tell [Hemingway].
“Hemingway was convinced that Ornella would win and my father was convinced she would lose.
“The girl from Trieste won and so the billiard cue, from which Hemingway had always been inseparable, passed to my father, a young pharmacist from Bologna.”
The billiard cue will be offered for sale on Dec 11 by an auction house called Art La Rosa, in Catania. The sale comes 60 years after Hemingway’s death in 1961.
The writer and adventurer knew Italy well – during the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver with the American Red Cross and served on the north-eastern front, where the Italians battled Austro-hungarian forces.
He was badly wounded in July 1918 while handing out cigarettes and chocolate to Italian troops on the front line. He was hit by dozens of fragments of an Austrian mortar shell and wounded in the foot, legs and hands.
Hemingway was taken to a Red Cross hospital in Milan where he fell in love with a nurse.
His experiences provided the basis for one of his best-known novels, Farewell to Arms, published in 1929.