Vali Myers, A Memoir

Gianni Menichetti (2006)

A legend in her own time, Australian artist Vali Myers was the premiere dancer with the Melbourne Modern Ballet at the age of seventeen. Leaving home in 1950, she spent years in Paris, where the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken photographed her and some of the other young people hanging out in the cafes. Those photos became the book, Love on the Left Bank. During that period she befriended George Plimpton, who published an article about her, along with some of her drawings, in The Paris Review.

In 1958, Vali and her then-husband Rudi Rappold made a home for themselves in the wild Valley of Il Porto in Positano, Italy, where she would live for the next forty years, working on her exquisite drawings and looking after a large menagerie of animals. After much effort, she succeeded in having the Valley designated a protected wildlife oasis. When she returned to Australia in 1993 for the first time since she’d left, she found herself welcomed as a national treasure. In this memoir by her long-time companion Gianni Menichetti, Vali’s life and life’s work are brought into beautiful, clear focus with wit, candor, and affection.

ISBN: 9780978560607
Publisher: Golda Foundation
Publication Date: August 2, 2006
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 244
Language: English

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Below you’ll find videos in which to enjoy the voices of Vali Myers and Gianni Menichetti both. A further look around the YouTube website will lead you to more such audiovisual treasures.

Vali Myers, SBS interview, 2003
His Savage Mistress