In the summer of 1957, rebelling against her family and anxious to impress an admirer who had moved to Paris, 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. Drawing on letters that she wrote to David Ross, her admirer and correspondent, and to her parents in London, Johnson describes her life as she flits from palazzo to Lido to palazzo. Absorbed into the social whirl of the super-rich, how do her feelings for her love begin to change?

This 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 age.

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.