A Venetian Affair
Authors: Andrea Di Robilant
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #History, #Europe, #Italy, #Fiction
Table of Contents
Acclaim for Andrea di Robilant’s
A VENETIAN AFFAIR
“Spectacular. . . . Plunges into the comic-opera world of eighteenth-century Venetian high society. . . . All who have drunk from the poisoned chalice of forbidden love will recognize something of themselves here.”
—
Elle
“The best novel I’ve read in years . . . except that it happens to be true. . . . So immediate, vivid, and powerful that it takes you inside the minds and, indeed, the bodies of its two passionate protagonists. . . . Unforgettable.”
—Simon Schama, author of
A History of Great Britain
“Delicious and unique, marrying the vicarious thrill of reading someone else’s love letters with the . . . color of Casanova’s eighteenth-century Venice.”
—
Philadelphia City Paper
“Rarely does [a love story] emerge from history’s pages with the immediacy found in [di Robilant’s] A Venetian A fair. . . . Spellbinding.”
—
Vogue
“An enchantment. Andrea di Robilant hasn’t just brought a splendid Venetian love affair to life, he has brought eighteenth-century Europe to life, both intimately and grandly. This is narrative history at its very best.”
—John Casey, author of
The Half-life of Happiness
“Moving. . . . Brings alive eighteenth-century Venice.”
—
Newsday
“Compelling. . . . Delight and romance lie in the ‘forbidden’ language of the letters. . . . A love story not only passionate, but saucy, chimerical, impudent, ardent and tragic.”
—
The Observer
(London)
“Conveys the climate of scandal and intrigue that made romance so interesting in mid-eighteenth-century Europe and reminds us how wonderfully obstacles inflame and sustain passion.”
—
The Boston Globe
“Andrea di Robilant brilliantly evokes Venice in the age of Casanova-masked balls, elegant salons, louche casinos, and social, political, and romantic intrigue.
A Venetian A fair
is luminous, erotic, and utterly spellbinding.”
—John Berendt, author of
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
“Remarkable. . . . Exhilarating. . . . [These] love letters bring characters to life as no other writing can.”
—
The Guardian
(London)
“The reality of these two flesh and blood lives is never in doubt. They remind us that love’s pleasures and pains are timeless.”
—
The Dallas Morning News
“Andrea di Robilant narrates with precision and obvious affection the world he re-creates.”
—The Trenton Times
“A sophisticated work of Belles Lettres. . . . [Di Robilant has] a journalist’s nose for intrigue and a novelist’s ear and eye for evocation. . . . A delicious literary feast.”
—
The Globe & Mail
(Toronto)
“[Di Robilant] does more than merely quote their words. Interweaving dramatic scenes and keenly observed passages, he creates a narrative of novelistic resonance.”
—
Newark Star-Ledger
“Fascinating. . . . Seductive. . . . An irresistible tale of two innocents wounded by Cupid’s ill-aimed arrows. . . . If, in this jaded age, any hopeless romantics remain . . . their spirits will be fortified by
A Venetian A fair
.”
—
Nashville Scene
Prologue
Some years ago, my father came home with a carton of old letters that time and humidity had compacted into wads of barely legible paper. He announced that he had found them in the attic of the old family palazzo on the Grand Canal, where he had lived as a boy in the twenties. Many times, my father had enthralled my brothers and me with stories from his enchanted childhood—there had been gondola rides and children’s tea parties and picnics at the Lido, and in the background the grown-ups always seemed to be drinking champagne and giving fancy-dress balls. Equally romantic to us, though much more melancholy, was his account of how my grandparents’ lavish and extravagant lifestyle had begun fraying at the edges. By the early thirties, art dealers were dropping by more and more frequently. Large empty patches appeared on the walls. Pieces of antique furniture were carried out of the house. Even the worn banners and rusty swords our fierce ancestors had wrested from the hated Turks were sold at auction. Eventually, my spendthrift grandfather sold off the palace floor by floor, severing the family ties to Venice and leaving my father so bereft that he yearned for his Venetian heritage for the rest of his life. He never lived in Venice again, but even as an older man he continued to make nostalgic pilgrimages to the places of his childhood and especially to that grand old house, which had long ceased to belong to us, but where the family still kept a few old boxes and crates.
The di Robilant family is actually of Piedmontese origin. The Venetian connection was established at the end of the nineteenth century when Edmondo di Robilant, my very tall and rather austere great-grandfather from Turin, married my great-grandmother Valentina Mocenigo, a formidable Venetian
grande dame
with beautiful black eyes and a very sharp tongue. The Mocenigos were one of the old ruling families of Venice—“they gave seven doges to the Republic” my father never tired of repeating to us children. Of course, the glorious days of the Venetian Republic were long gone when my great-grandparents married, but the last Mocenigos still had palaces and money and beautiful paintings. So the impecunious di Robilants moved to Venice after World War I and fairly quickly ran through what remained of the Mocenigo fortune.
My father, having grown up in the fading grandeur of Palazzo Mocenigo, came to revere his Venetian ancestry more than the Piedmontese. To him the box of letters was a small treasure he had miraculously retrieved from his Venetian past. And I remember well the look of cheerful anticipation he had on his face when he arrived at our house in Tuscany and placed it on the dining room table for all the family to see.
The letters were badly frayed and had wax marks and purplish traces of wine on them. They looked intriguing. They were not the usual household inventories that occasionally surfaced, like timeworn family flotsam, in some forgotten recess of the
palazzo
in Venice. We pried them open one by one and soon realized they were intimate love letters that dated back to the 1750s. Some pages were covered with mysterious hieroglyphs that added mystery to my father’s discovery. We spent a rainy weekend cracking the strange cipher and trying to make some sense of the first fragments we were able to read. I remember we were wary of delving into secrets buried so long ago. Yet we labored on because the spell was irresistible.
At the end of that long weekend I went back to Rome, where I was then working as a journalist, while my father took on the task of deciphering and transcribing the cache of one hundred or so letters in his possession. What eventually emerged from his painstaking labor was the remarkable love story between our ancestor Andrea Memmo, scion of one of the oldest Venetian families, and Giustiniana Wynne, a bright and beautiful Anglo-Venetian of illegitimate birth. The letters revealed a deep romantic passion that was at odds with the gallant, lighthearted lovemaking one often thinks of as typical of the eighteenth century. It was also, very clearly, a clandestine relationship: the curious-looking dots and circles and tiny geometric figures scribbled across the pages were a graphic testimony to the fear the two lovers must have felt lest their letters fall into the wrong hands.
When my father began to dig around Andrea and Giustiniana’s story, he soon found traces of their romance in the public archives in Venice, Padua, and even Paris and London. It turned out that students of eighteenth-century Venice had first become acquainted with the relationship through the writings of Giacomo Casanova, who had been a close friend of both Andrea and Giustiniana. In the first years of the last century Gustav Gugitz, the great Casanova scholar, identified the Mademoiselle XCV who figures prominently in Casanova’s memoirs as Giustiniana.
1
Then, in the twenties, Bruno Brunelli, a Venetian historian, found two small volumes of handwritten copies of letters from Giustiniana to Andrea in the archives in Padua. He wrote a book based on those letters and lamented the fact that he had not found Andrea’s letters as well. He consoled himself with the notion that they could not possibly have been “as absorbing as Giustiniana’s.” Judging from her correspondence, he said, it did not appear that Andrea “had the temperament of a great lover.”
2
Other Casanova specialists were drawn to Andrea and Giustiniana. Many combed old bookshops and antique stores hoping to find Andrea’s letters, but in vain. The stash my father had stumbled upon as he rummaged in the attic of Palazzo Mocenigo proved to be the missing part of the story—the other voice. Clearly these letters had at some point been returned to Andrea by Giustiniana and preserved by the family; but they were by no means all of Andrea’s letters. Many had been burnt, and many more had probably been left to rot and then thrown away. But those we had were rich enough to provide a far more complete picture of the love story—and to disprove Brunelli’s contention about Andrea’s temperament as a lover.
Once my father finished transcribing the letters, he tried to publish them. Time went by, and I wondered whether he would ever complete his project. My father did not have the natural inclination to put together a book: his real talent was in
telling
a good story. Over the years I heard him talk about Andrea and Giustiniana again and again as he polished their romance into a perfect conversation piece. How vividly he comes back to me now, glass of red wine in hand, charming dinner guests with yet another elegant account of
his
Venetian love story. He revered Andrea, who went on to become one of the last in a long line of Venetian statesmen. And, lady’s man that he was, he adored Giustiniana—for her looks, her spirit, and her lively intelligence. My father rooted for them with genuine affection even as he explained to his listeners, who were perhaps not sufficiently well versed in Venetian laws and customs, that it had been
“un amore impossibile”
—an impossible love. It was unthinkable in those days for a prominent member of the ruling elite such as Andrea to marry a girl with Giustiniana’s murky lineage. She had been born out of wedlock, her mother’s background was checkered at best, and her father was an obscure English baronet and a Protestant to boot. For this reason, my father would explain, they saw each other in secret and often wrote to each other using their strange alphabet. Whereupon he would bring his audience to a peak of excitement by scribbling a few words in the private code of Andrea and Giustiniana.
In the end the treasured letters became, above all else, an excuse for my father to ramble on about his heroes and the city he loved so much. And they probably would have remained just that if events had not taken a sad and completely unexpected turn. In January 1997 an intruder entered my father’s apartment in Florence and bludgeoned him to death. It was a senseless, incomprehensible act—a violent end for a gentle, life-loving man. After the funeral my brothers and I stayed in Florence for a week in the hope of being of some assistance to the investigation. During those difficult days the story of Andrea and Giustiniana could not have been further from my mind—until it suddenly appeared in the local newspapers. The carabinieri had found my father’s laptop computer open on his worktable, so they had seized it as evidence, together with the floppy disks on which he had transcribed the letters. They went on to leak information about Andrea and Giustiniana to the press.
3
In an even more bizarre twist, the carabinieri sent a few agents up to Venice to check into possible leads.
The murder investigation led nowhere, and two years later it was abandoned. My father’s belongings, including Andrea’s original letters, the discs with the transcriptions, and the notes on the cipher, were returned to us. By that time I had moved to Washington as the new correspondent for the Italian daily
La Stampa.
But I made a promise to myself that I would do my best to carry out my father’s original plan to publish the letters in one form or another once my assignment in the United States was over. My resolve was further strengthened when I found another trove of letters in a library just a short distance away from my new posting as foreign correspondent.
James Rives Childs was an American diplomat and scholar who developed a minor passion for Giustiniana as a result of his studies on Casanova. In the early fifties he was in Venice looking for the unexpected nugget that might enrich his collection of Casanoviana. He came upon a small volume of letters from Giustiniana to Andrea, which added another fascinating chapter to their love story. He never got around to publishing them, although a few excerpts appeared in his newsletter,
Casanova Gleanings.
Ambassador Childs died in 1988, having bequeathed his collection— including Giustiniana’s letters—to his alma mater, Randolph Macon College, in Ashland, Virginia, a mere two hours away from Washington, D.C. That part of Virginia was already very familiar to me. Childs—the coincidence would have delighted my father— came from Lynchburg, where my mother had grown up (she attended Randolph Macon Women’s College). So for me the quest that had begun several years earlier with the letters my father had found in the attic of his childhood home in Venice ended, rather eerily, a few miles up the road from my mother’s birthplace in America.
The early 1750s—the period when Andrea and Giustiniana first met—was a particularly poignant moment in Venice’s long twilight. The thousand-year-old Republic was less than five decades away from its swift collapse before Napoleon Bonaparte’s invading army. Signs of decline had been evident for a long time, and no reasonable Venetian believed the Serenissima, as the Republic had been known for centuries, could reclaim the place it had once occupied among the powerful nations of the world. Yet Venice did not seem like a civilization that was drawing its last breath. On the contrary, it was living a vibrant, even self-confident old age. The economy was growing. The streets were busy, and the stores were filled with spices, jewelry, luxurious fabrics, and household goods. On the mainland, agriculture and stock farming underwent revolutionary changes, and wealthy Venetians built grand villas on their country estates. The population was rising, and Venice, with its 140,000 inhabitants, was still one of the most populous cities in Europe. An experienced and generally conservative government composed of a maze of interlocking councils and commissions (whose members derived from the most powerful families) ran the city in a manner that had altered little for centuries. Venice’s ruling class remained an exclusive caste, whose symbol was the Golden Book—the official record of the Venetian patriciate. Its obstinate refusal to let new blood into its ranks, coupled with a deep-seated resistance to change after such a long and glorious history, was weakening its hand. But, as one historian has observed, “the future of this state founded on an intelligent form of paternalism still seemed assured.”
4
The middle years of the eighteenth century also saw an extraordinary flowering of the arts that hardly fits the image of a dying civilization. In fact, it turned out to be the last, glorious burst of Venice’s creative genius, and what a feast it was—Tiepolo at work on his celestial frescoes at Ca’ Rezzonico, Goldoni writing his greatest comedies, Galuppi filling the air with his joyful music. There had never been more amusements and distractions in Venice. One pictures the endless Carnival, the extravagant balls, and the theaters fairly bursting with boisterous spectators. The stage was flourishing: there were seven major theaters operating in the 1750s and they were filled with rowdy crowds every night. The most popular meeting place of all, however, was the Ridotto, the public gambling house that was famous across Europe. Venetians were in the grip of a massive gambling addiction, and they were especially hooked on faro, a card game similar to baccarat (“faro” stood for “pharaoh,” and was the king card). There were several gambling rooms at the Ridotto, with as many as eighty playing tables in all. They opened up on a long, candlelit hall—the
sala
lunga
—where an eclectic crowd of masked men and women mingled and gossiped about who was piling up sequins that night and who was piling up debt.
The mask, perhaps more than anything else, was the symbol of those carefree days. It had become, by then, an integral part of the Venetian attire, like wigs and fans and beauty spots. Masks came in two kinds: the more casual black or white
moreta,
that covered only the eyes, and the “cloaked” mask, or
bautta,
which hid the entire head down to the shoulders. Venetians were allowed to wear masks in public from October until Lent, with the exception of the novena—the nine-day period before Christmas—and everyone wore one, from the doge down to the women selling vegetables at the market. The custom added a little mystery and intrigue to everyday life.
The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) between the major European powers would soon come to darken spirits and change the atmosphere in the city. The Venetian Republic, neutral throughout this long conflict, which put an end to French expansionism and marked the rise of Great Britain as the dominant power, was going to feel adrift and ultimately lost after the war. But until then there prevailed a sense that things would go on unchanged as they had for centuries and that life should therefore be enjoyed to the fullest.