Andrea di Robilant (born 13 February 1957) is an Italian journalist and writer.
Early life and education
Di Robilant was born in Rome, Italy, and attended a Swiss boarding school, Institut Le Rosey. He moved to New York for university, where he earned his BA in History in 1979 from Columbia College and his MA in International Relations from the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in 1980.
He is the eldest of three sons of Count Alvise Nicolis di Robilant e Cereaglio, of Piedmontese and Venetian ancestry, and American Elizabeth, née Stokes. His father, a descendant of Italian statesman and diplomat Carlo Felice Nicolis, conte di Robilant, was managing director of Sotheby's in Italy; he was found murdered in his apartment in the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence in 1997, aged 72. The murder remains unsolved.
Other members of his family include General Mario Nicolis di Robilant, who commanded the Italian Fourth Army at Monte Grappa during World War I.
His great-great-great-great grandmother, Lucia Memmo, married Alvise Mocenigo, a member of the House of Mocenigo that played a pivotal role in Venice's history. In 1818, Lucia rented the piano nobile of Palazzo Mocenigo to Lord Byron, who wrote parts of Don Juan at the family mansion, and hosted illustrious figures such as François-René de Chateaubriand and Effie Ruskin throughout her life. Lucia's father, Andrea Memmo, was the Venetian ambassador to the Papal States and a prominent citizen of the Republic of Venice. Both of di Robilant's ancestors became subjects of his books. and a sequel entitled Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon (2008) based on Andrea's daughter, Lucia Mocenigo. He subsequently left La Stampa to pursue a full-time writing career.
In 2011, he published Irresistible North: From Venice to Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers, in which he analyses the claim that two Venetian merchants, the Zeno brothers, sailed over the north Atlantic in a pre-Columbian expedition to North America.
In an article in the New York Times, Sara Wheeler wrote that the main problem with the book was "evidential unreliability" and that while praising the author adds that "any chance of this flimsy tale adding up to a truly worthwhile book dies on a tidy of anachronism and cliche.
In a review in Renaissance Quarterly Elizabeth Horodowich wrote that "Di Robilant’s Irresistible North is entirely based on the question of veracity: he assumes the fourteenth-century Zen voyage to be true and attempts to prove this by following in the travelers’ footsteps across the Atlantic."
His new book, Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse was published in 2018.
Di Robilant lives in Rome. He is a writer and a professor at The American University of Rome.
Personal life
He and his wife, Alessandra Mattirolo, have two sons, Tommaso and Sebastiano.