When the 1917 revolution struck Russia, Anna Akhmatova was 28. Her family members and close friends began to disappear, some were killed by radical Marxists, others were exiled to Siberia or forced to flee abroad. Akhmatova, however, stayed in her beloved St. Petersburg – to become the tsarina of Russian poetry. Sheremetev Palace The noble palace by the Fontanka River was soon taken over by the Bolsheviks, its endless enfilades split into communal flats. It was here, in one of the poky rooms...

Only a few months after an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union, the poet Joseph Brodsky took a flight to Venice. He came back here again and again – "Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life," his mentor Anna Akhmatova used to say – wrote numerous poems in or about Venice, and, perhaps, simply felt happy here. Today, twenty-five years after the poet's death, many of Brodsky's favorite Venetian sights are still here for you to admire. Zattere Why come to Venice in...

Cuba – it is to this proud Caribbean nation that Ernest Hemingway, the quintessential American writer, dedicated his Nobel Prize. It is at his Cuban finca that he started and finished The Old Man and the Sea – for which he was awarded the prize in 1954 – and it is in his favorite hotel room in Havana that he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls . The city – if not the whole island – is crisscrossed with Hemingway's travels. Anecdotes and legends featuring Papa are shared, even today in the...