May 8, 1954, was a day of unsettled weather, with temperatures relatively cool, at least according to the forecast in La Stampa. At around 11:30 a.m., a luxury car pulled into Piazza Galimberti, Cuneo’s elegant central square, and stopped at the corner of Corso Nizza. The driver and his passenger stepped out. The latter was a tall man with a white beard and glasses.

 With the engine still warm, the parked car caught the attention of a traffic officer. He approached, then stood in disbelief as the passenger stretched his legs, a sign that he had been on the road for some time. In an excited voice, summoning all the foreign-language skills he could muster, the officer asked, “You are Mr. Hemingway, aren’t you?”. The man looked at the driver, smiled and replied, “Yes.”

Even in a provincial Italian city like Cuneo, the great writer was hardly likely to go unnoticed. Two years earlier, in 1952, one of Hemingway’s masterpieces, The Old Man and the Sea, had been published in Italy by Mondadori, in a translation by Fernanda Pivano. It was Arnoldo Mondadori himself who, in Milan, had learned that the writer was heading to Cannes, where his wife, Mary, was waiting for him, and suggested that he stop in Cuneo to sample the city’s celebrated Cuneesi al rhum chocolates.

 Surrounded by admirers thrusting books at him to sign, Hemingway quickly became the center of a commotion. A nearby bookstore sold out of every copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls in no time. After buying two magazines, Life and Time, at the newsstand on the corner, he entered the historic Arione pastry shop, which overlooks Piazza Galimberti, to taste the famous local chocolates. He ordered two one-kilogram boxes to take away, along with a double whiskey.

 Within minutes, the shop was packed with curious onlookers, astonished to find themselves face to face with the celebrated writer, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature just a few years later. As Hemingway scrawled his signature across book covers, back covers, coffee-shop napkins and scraps of paper, the noise grew deafening. At last, he cast a pleading glance at his driver, who cleared a path through the crowd and helped him reach the car.

 A reporter for L’Unità, Gianni De Matteis, managed to ask one final question: “What do you think of Cuneo?”. “You have a very beautiful, orderly city,” Hemingway replied. “It’s a shame I don’t have time to visit it.”  Then the car sped off toward the French Riviera.