Andrea Di Robilant Boeken

In 1797, Lucia, the beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter of a Venetian statesman, was married off to Alvise Mocenigo, scion of one of the wealthiest and most powerful families of the once glorious maritime Republic. They were a golden couple in Venice s twilight years. But Lucia s life was suddenly transformed when the thousand-year-old Serenissima collapsed under the blows of young Bonaparte in 1797. Whether as a dazzling young hostess in Habsburg Vienna, lady-in-waiting at the court of Prince Eugene de Beauharnais in Milan, single mother in Paris during the fall of Napoleon s Empire or as Byron s hard-fisted landlady during the poet s stay in Venice, Lucia lived to be a remarkable witness to an age of great turmoil. Two hundred years later, Andrea di Robilant, Lucia s great-great-great-great grandson, has unearthed letters and diaries in archives across Europe to draw an intimate and vivid portrait of his ancestor, and of the exceptional times she lived in.

In the waning days of Venice’s glory in the mid-1700s, Andrea Memmo was scion to one the city’s oldest patrician families. At the age of twenty-four he fell passionately in love with sixteen-year-old Giustiniana Wynne, the beautiful, illegitimate daughter of a Venetian mother and British father. Because of their dramatically different positions in society, they could not marry. And Giustiniana’s mother, afraid that an affair would ruin her daughter’s chances to form a more suitable union, forbade them to see each other. Her prohibition only fueled their desire and so began their torrid, secret seven-year-affair, enlisting the aid of a few intimates and servants (willing to risk their own positions) to shuttle love letters back and forth and to help facilitate their clandestine meetings. Eventually, Giustiniana found herself pregnant and she turned for help to the infamous Casanova–himself infatuated with her.Two and half centuries later, the unbelievable story of this star-crossed couple is told in a breathtaking narrative, re-created in part from the passionate, clandestine letters Andrea and Giustiniana wrote to each other.

The fascinating story of the Venetian who helped to map the World during the Renaissance, by the author of A Venetian Affair and Autumn in Venice.