Hemingway finally understood the decisive role of human piety. The piety that unites us to all the beings that live and die in nature, the piety that human beings can say until they don’t say themselves anymore. The greatest height that is granted to us during our short life.


Fisherman, hunter, drinker, always traveling between wars, bullfights and weddings, Ernest Hemingway is remembered for aspects that have made him a cover character.  Yet, he was first and foremost a writer. Indeed, the most influential writer of the twentieth century, by large strokes the most beloved, certainly the most imitated.
Matteo Nucci decides to free the field from false myths and starting from the works, even before life, he offers us a new and decisive portrait. That of a tormented man, always struggling with the death grazed in Italy during the Great War, and above all an extraordinary writer, obsessed with style and even more with the search for deep truth, which never coincides with the mere account of the actual events.
Nucci rereads Hemingway with his eyes as an author, as well as a lover of the oldest literature. Homer and Plato enter the scene to help us shed new light on some of the writer’s most famous and misunderstood theories, such as the one according to which true literature is an iceberg, a mountain of which only the tip is seen, and that remains almost entirely hidden from the sea depths, or as the expression, wonderful, "grace under pressure", "grace under pressure". Because, in the constant challenge to the world, to the page and especially to himself, Hemingway tried never to lose grace. That same grace that pervades his books, telling the simplicity, fragility and piety of unforgettable heroes.  The image with which we close the book will eventually surprise us. We will find ourselves in front of a writer who has set out towards the mystical heights of absolute love. A writer who finally asks us to deal with ourselves.
He dreamt about lions is an important and revealing book about Hemingway and writing in general. An indispensable book for those who believe that literature and life are inexorably and inextricably intertwined.