Chasing the Rose

Andrea di Robilant was born in Italy. He was educated at Le Rosey and Columbia University. He is an Italian journalist and writer. In 2003 he wrote his first book A Venetian Affair. It is a biography of his ancestor in 18th century Venice based on their correspondence; and a sequel entitled Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon was released in 2008. It was in this book that the search to uncover the identity of the anonymous rose began. Di Robilant¿s describes a pink rose that leads to an invitation to meet the doyenne of European roses, Sra. Eleonora Garlant. The question is- could this unnamed rose possibly be the long-lost Rose Bichonne, a China rose that nineteenth-century growers cultivated but which had apparently disappeared since? 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.

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