Lucia : a Venetian life in the age of Napoleon

by Andrea Di Robilant

Paper Book, 2008

Status

Available

Call number

945/.311082092B

Genres

Publication

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Description

In 1787, Lucia, the beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter of a prominent Venetian statesman, is married off to Alvise Mocenigo, scion of one of the most powerful Venetian families. But their life as a golden couple will be suddenly transformed when Venice falls to Bonaparte. As the larger events unfolding around Lucia mingle with her most personal concerns, we witness-through her letters to her sister and other primary sources-her painful series of miscarriages and the pressure on her to produce an heir; her impassioned affair with an Austrian officer and its stunning results; the glamour and strain of her career as a hostess in Hapsburg Vienna and lady-in-waiting at the court of Napoleon's stepson, Prince Eug ne de Beauharnais, as well as her intimate relationship with the Empress Josephine; and her amazing firsthand account of the defeat of Napoleon in Paris in 1814. In her later years, Lucia, regal and still beautiful and a bit battle-hardened herself, was Byron's landlord during the poet's stay in Venice. In a fitting finale to this sweeping drama, Lucia stands as a relic of a lost golden age: she created, in part, the aura that gave rise to the Romantic view of Italy and its culture that we still nourish today. With the brave and articulate Lucia at the center of his re-creation of this remarkable historical period, Andrea di Robilant has once again reached across the centuries, and deep into his own past, to bring history to rich and vivid life on the page.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member ros.peters

I loved this history book. It told the story of the incredible life of Lucia, an ancestor of the author, and her life in and around Venice at the fall of the Venetian empire. It read like a novel and was full of amazing detail and a credit to the author's meticulous research. I would love to read

the author's other history books. Well done.

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LibraryThing member Kasthu

Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon begins where Andrea Di Robilant’s A Venetian Affair left off. Lucia Mocenigo, one of the author's ancestors, was the eldest daughter of Andrea Memmo, and she married at seventeen into one of the best-known patrician families in Venice. When the

Republic fell in 1797 to Napoleon, Lucia went to Vienna, where she became friends with Josephine Bonaparte. Later, Lucia moved back to Venice, where she became Byron’s landlord. She died in the 1850s, when she was in her 80s.

Lucia is a compelling look into the life of an intriguing woman. She was at the heart of European political change, as her letters to her husband and sister show. What Di Robilant does successfully in this book, as he did in A Venetian Affair, is bring the event s and people to life. Everything Lucia, her husband Alvise, and her son Alvisetto, do is documented here with precision. Sometimes with too much precision: when her son was a teenager, Lucia obsessively worried over his progress in school. But in all, Lucia was an impressive woman who rose to the challenges she faced with courage.

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LibraryThing member MarthaJeanne

An interesting biography involving various cities that I know (particularly Venice and Vienna) and an interesting time period. Added interest came from the fact that the author is a descendant of Lucia.

LibraryThing member setnahkt

A rather pleasant, romance-novel sort of story – except it’s true. While researching family papers, author Andrea di Robilant found a box of letters belonging to his great**4 grandmother, Lucia Mocenigo. There were probably thousands of men and women of Lucia’s time that had more interesting

life stories, but hers got recorded – born in a patrician but impoverished Venetian family; married at 16 to the scion of an equally patrician but considerably less impoverished Venetian family. Miscarriages and death of a child; tenderness and conflict with her husband; political difficulties as Venice is torn apart between Austria and France; an illicit love affair and reconciliation with her husband; being what was essentially a single mom; deaths in the family; and eventually ending up as Byron’s landlady. The charm is that the politics and turmoil are interspersed with talk about dresses for court, gardening plans, and a recipe for chocolate dessert cakes. Light reading but engaging and very well done; I’ll have to check out di Robilant’s other book about Venice.

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