
East meets West in Venice: the unlikely love affair between a Hermitage curator and a Cambridge don
Iain Pears calls his book “a simple tale of two people from a world long ago who meet and fall in love”. But the story of how Larissa Salmina (1931-2024) and Francis Haskell (1928-2000) found each other in 1962, at a random restaurant in Venice, is …