Why a Booktrail?
1920s – Sit back on your sun lounger, with your oversized sunglasses on your face and a margarita in your hand and really get to know Cap D’Antibes with the Fitzgeralds and their friends
Villa America
What you need to know before your trail
Tender is the Night amongst the cool quiet skies of the Cap D’Antibes.
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Cole and Linda Porter, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos – all summer guests of Gerald and Sara Murphy.
Villa America, perched on the shores in the Cap D’Antibes, is legendary for its parties and image of a playground for the rich and famous. It s a place where art and culture shine but where debauchery and extravagance is not far behind.
This is also the home that Gerald and Sara built – their beautiful world – which is invaded by someone who will change everything and everything they’ve ever known.
Travel Guide
Sunglasses – check, towel and sun cream – check, large margarita – check and jazz music on in the background – check. Now the recreation of a bygone time and era is almost complete. Now you’re ready to enter the world of the Murphy’s and the Fitzgeralds to name but a few classic names from the lost generation. Maybe you’ll bump into Picasso….they’re all gathered here.
May was such a beautiful time of year on the Riviera Sara thought, as they drove along the cliffs. Paris was still grey and damp…
Villa America
This is a real house and was built by Sara and Gerald Murphy as a creative bolt hole and party playground as it became known. Expat Americans living the high life with cocktails in one hand and champagne in the other.
“The Murphy’s had invented summer in the Riviera”
This is the time of the Golden Age but the golden age immediately seems bruised from the very first line –
“The sky was as blue as a robin’s egg on the afternoon they pulled Owen Chambers’ body out of the Baie des Anges”
Summer parties on the Cap D’antibes
But summer parties with summer guests are what Villa Americana has been built for and what the expats and their famous friends are there for. You can feel the heat off the page, hear the excited chatter, the clatter of sun loungers and the shadow of the parasols. A lot of glitz and glamour but with dark currents underneath the glistening waters –
“Villas long empty and haunted, dotted among the hills of the small fishing village of the Cap d’antibes”
Nothing is as it seems and a marriage about to be shattered and the golden age about to lose its shine.
Fact and fiction mix to dramatic effect but the sense of time and place and the Expat flashy lifestyle based on the real life inspiration for Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information:
Twitter: @lizaklauss
Back to Results
Where Next?
