I’ll stop writing now because I don’t feel at all well. . . . Farewell, and forgive me for not matching all your kind words. Today I have been sincere with you, and my sincerity cannot but tell you things which prove my fondest affection and friendship for you.
Giustiniana felt her strength failing after sending off her letter, and she retired to her room. “I’ve become melancholic, and this malady is affecting my mood and my spirits. I am not the same person anymore, and every pleasure has become dull and burdensome.” The next day she felt worse, and after another difficult night she called for help. “I’m really not well,” she wrote, switching back to French. “My health is very weak, and last night I really thought it was the end. I was forced to call Dr. Berci in at four o’clock in the morning. I’ve decided to put myself in his hands to cure what he calls my ‘attacks of melancholic hysteria.’ ” She asked Andrea not to mention any of this to her mother in Venice. There was no point: “Apart from the fact that my suffering is great and my anxiety even greater, these illnesses are not dangerous.”
Andrea wrote several times a day now—affectionate letters in which he wished her well. But Giustiniana no longer had the energy to write much at all. She asked him to forgive her “for not replying to all your letters.” Andrea thanked her for the muffs. He and Miss Mendez had not taken to each other, he was sorry to report. Giustiniana asked him to make an effort despite what she now realized was a “silly” idea to get them together: “Try to appease her; she can be mean, and it is an advantage to have such people on one’s side. You will tell me you don’t much care. But my vanity is sensitive to compliments paid to you, and so I beg you to do this for me—even if it is but a whim on my part. . . . I’ll stop now. I’m weak and this evening I’ll take a cure. Again, I forbid you to say anything about this to my mother.”
She spent the next few days drifting about the house, awaiting news from Mrs. Anna. Her tone with Andrea became more distant. On November 23: “I haven’t written in two days. I really haven’t had time. . . . A thousand necessary chores have robbed me of all my time. I have not had an hour to myself.” And later: “Mon cher frère, forgive me, I have written little or nothing. I’m not well. I’m melancholic. The saddest curse has fallen upon me, and everything has become unbearable. I have received your letters regularly, and if I were sensitive to anything it would be to your kindness. . . . I’m sorry to hear about the difficulties you’re facing in your love life. But Memmo, if you’re sure of her, does anything else matter?”
The Wynnes had meant to stay no more than ten days in Padua. Three weeks had now gone by, and they were still camping out at Ca’ Erizzo. There was apparently a bureaucratic hitch. Mrs. Anna had found a house, but she was hesitating because it was available for only six months. The city authorities, meanwhile, were waiting for Mrs. Anna to sign the lease before issuing an entry permit for the family, which was needed in addition to the residency permit they had already received when they were still in London. The delay was making Giustiniana irritable: “Why doesn’t my mother take the house? And why haven’t you persuaded her yet? Meanwhile, I’m stuck here; I’m not well, and I’m bored. . . . Since my mother can take the house for only six months, why all the fuss about the entry permits? We’ll be there such a short period of time. . . . Come, Memmo, free us from this hindrance.”
Giustiniana would think about the future later on. Right now she just wanted to rest; she wanted her room and fresh linen and a little peace. “Allow me to come to Venice and trust me, as you should, for I have forsaken all claims.”
Finally, on November 26, word came that Mrs. Anna had secured the house and the entry permits had been granted. It would be another couple of days before their trunks were ready, and there were still a few errands to do before the trip to Venice. But the news cleared the air, and Giustiniana’s spirits lifted for the first time since arriving in Padua. “It seems I am happy today, or at least not as sad as I usually feel. . . . I am much obliged for your sweet words in your last letter. But Memmo, you know we must not believe in them. And poor us if we should still listen to our hearts. I don’t know what mine tells me about you; but even if it spoke out it would gain nothing, for I have sworn to be deaf. For pity’s sake, let us remain friends.
“So I’ll see you at Mira? I feel pleasure in imagining this reunion. . . . I don’t drive the idea away from me. . . . Basta. Enough now. . . . Farewell, Memmo.”
Did Giustiniana and Andrea ever meet at Mira? This is the last fragment of their correspondence to have come down to us, so we are left without an answer. One day, perhaps, other letters will reveal to us what happened that morning. But it is hard to escape the feeling that the little river town ten miles up the road from Padua was indeed where the final act of their love affair took place—whether or not Andrea ever made it to their appointment. Giustiniana’s last letters are filled with so much foreboding that we, the prying readers, understand it is over perhaps even before she does. Yet in the tone of those letters we recognize a new resoluteness as well. It is the clearheaded determination of someone who has weathered a storm and is leaving it behind. Giustiniana was now ready to complete her journey, even as she made it clear that Venice was not her final destination and she was going to live her life beyond its stifling confines. And so we picture her boarding the burchiello at Mira with a steady foot and traveling confidently down the gentle waters of the Brenta, past fishing villages and elegant villas, then out into the lagoon, toward the shimmering city across the horizon.
Postscript
At least Andrea and Giustiniana did not live to see the end of their beloved Republic!” my father scribbled wistfully at the end of his notes to the letters. It was a typical thing for him to say: two centuries after Bonaparte’s victorious invasion, the old Venetian in him still ached at the Republic’s ignominious end. As I read those words I was also reminded of how much he had identified with Andrea, not to mention the terrible crush he had developed on Giustiniana and his disappointment at how things had turned out between his two lovers.
In September 2001, nearly five years after my father’s death, I went to Venice with my family to write the book he had wanted to write. We found a small house on the Campiello agli Incurabili, just off the Zattere. It was right on the water and had a small enclosed garden filled with oleanders and laurels and roving wisteria. In daytime the reflections of the sun danced on the walls and created a sense of perpetual movement. At night, when the city was silent, the rhythmic sloshing in the canal signaled the ebb and flow of the tide.
I had never lived in Venice before. To me it had always been the city of my father’s childhood. I saw it as I imagine most people do: as a museum full of tourists, a dead city. But as Venetians well know, it is much more than that. In Venice the past has remained alive in a vivid, disorienting way. It is with you all the time. It blends with the present. And sometimes, walking around the city, my head filled with Andrea and Giustiniana, I found myself slipping back in time so effortlessly that I didn’t know what century I was living in anymore.
I passed by Ca’ Memmo every week on my way to my youngest son’s music class. It stands imposingly to the east of the vaporetto stop of San Marcuola, on the north shore of the Grand Canal. Consul Smith’s palazzo is a little further along, on the same side of the Grand Canal, before the bend of the Rialto Bridge. It was recently converted into a luxury condominium for wealthy foreigners, yet the outward appearance of the building is the same as when Andrea and Giustiniana exchanged their first furtive kisses there two and a half centuries ago. Whenever I went by the very grand Palazzo Tiepolo, now Palazzo Papadopoli, I scratched my head trying to figure out which was the window on the mezzanine floor from which Andrea used to woo Giustiniana when the Wynnes lived next door.
The buildings are the same. The streets haven’t changed. Even the names on the doorbells are familiar. Gradually, I came to see how much the love story my father had dug up in the dusty attic of Palazzo Mocenigo had taken him back not jus
t to the city of his childhood, but to a place of the imagination where the great Venetian Republic lived on. And how the unraveling of Andrea and Giustiniana’s long affair had evoked in him—in a way that was still somewhat mysterious to me but that I was beginning to understand—the much vaster demise that was taking place all around them.
On the other hand, I am sure my father took comfort in learning, as he progressed in his research, that his two heroes went on to have full and fascinating lives. Each went his own way: Giustiniana became an accomplished author; Andrea became Venice’s last great statesman. But over the years they remained very close. Their world—the vanishing world of the Venetian Republic— was small enough that they were never very far apart. And when their paths did cross, they always met with that tenderness a first great love can create to last a lifetime.
Would Andrea and Giustiniana have been as distraught by the passing of the Venetian Republic as my father assumed? Probably not. Andrea always knew his life was tied to the fate of the city. But as much as he revered the Venice of the past, one has to wonder whether he would have shed a single tear for the passing of the inglorious Republic he had known in his lifetime. True, he was spared the final demise because his own death came sooner, but he was too intelligent a man not to see that Venice could not continue to survive by small concessions to change. By the time the gangrene began to spread in his own body, he knew the Republic was also doomed. As for Giustiniana, she died at a time when her life was no longer rooted in Venice. She lived mostly on the mainland. Her horizon had widened considerably. She traveled often. She wrote in French. She published her books in London. She was selfsufficient, independent, and worldly. In many ways she had become the woman she had tentatively begun to sketch in her letters to Andrea many years before, when she had so accurately predicted their separate fates: “You have to live in Venice, I don’t.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have seen the light if my father, Alvise di Robilant, had not discovered the letters of Andrea Memmo to Giustiniana Wynne. By the time of his death in 1997, he had spent many hours decoding and transcribing the letters and had done considerable research on the main characters of this story. The material he collected, his notes, and, above all, the many conversations we had about his discovery have inspired me throughout the writing of A Venetian A fair. It is his book, too, in more ways than I can say.
I first mentioned the story of Andrea and Giustiniana to Michael Carlisle, an old friend from Columbia University, in a long and rather rambling e-mail I sent to him in the winter of 2000. His enthusiastic response was crucial in getting me started on this project. Within a matter of days he became my agent, sold the book proposal, and set me to work. His encouragement and support have been unstinting.
My publisher, Sonny Mehta, took a gamble on a first-time author. I am deeply grateful to him for taking it. From day one it has been a privilege and a pleasure to work with all the people involved in the making of this book at Knopf. Deborah Garrison has been a devoted editor, stepping in nimbly to egg me on or to help me out. Her assistant, Ilana Kurshan, has been an effective and cheerful coordinator of our busy transatlantic correspondence.
I spent a year in Venice with my family to write A Venetian A fair. Claudio Saracco let us stay in his lovely little house at Campiello agli Incurabili and turned out to be a delightful and undemanding landlord. Most of the book was written at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, off Campo Santa Maria in Formosa. I could not have dreamed of finding a more pleasant atmosphere in which to work. My sincerest thanks go to Giorgio Busetto, the indefatigable director of the foundation, and to his wonderful staff.
The first person to ever write extensively about Andrea and Giustiniana was the Venetian historian Bruno Brunelli. His book, Casanova Loved Her, published in 1924, was based in large part on Giustiniana’s letters to Andrea. A lot of rich material has surfaced since then, apart from the letters discovered by my father, so it was possible for me to write a more complete and possibly more accurate account of their love story. Yet I always felt I was working in Brunelli’s shadow, and A Venetian A fair, perhaps inevitably, owes much to the lingering appeal of his book.
Rebecca Williamson, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has written perceptively about Giustiniana, gave me helpful guidance and advice. The architectural historian Susanna Pasquali, of the University of Ferrara, shared with me her knowledge about Andrea’s later correspondence. I also benefited from the suggestions of a happy band of casanovisti: Helmut Watzlawick, Giuseppe Bignami, and Furio Luccichenti. My greatest thanks go to Nancy Isenberg, of the University of Rome. Nancy has developed quite a passion for Andrea and Giustiniana’s story over the years. She has shared her considerable knowledge with me generously and enthusiastically, and has made important contributions to the final shape of my work.
A Venetian A fair has been at the center of my family’s life for three years. My young sons Tommaso and Sebastiano have been devoted supporters of the book even as they knew it was taking much of my time away from them. To my wife, Alessandra, I owe the most: for joining me in a project that has meant so much to me, and sharing in the many joys and the occasional miseries that have accompanied the writing of this book.
Epilogue
Giustiniana’s return to Venice after more than two years abroad was not a festive homecoming. Amid all the fuss over the Wynnes’ staggered arrival in the city, with Mrs. Anna’s fastidious search for an apartment and the bureaucratic difficulties over the entry permit, not to mention Andrea’s panicky state and M.’s suspiciousness, one can easily imagine the chattering men at the Listone indulging in snide little jokes about the return of the inglesine while the ladies chuckled behind their embroidered fans.
Even the small English community, which had always been a haven for Mrs. Anna and her children, received them with a certain reserve. Joseph Smith, now well into his eighties, was in the process of resigning his consulship. He had settled into his new marriage and was obsessively taken up with the sale of his large art and book collection to the new English monarch, George III. The aging Lady Montagu was her usual mordant self; according to a shocked young English visitor by the name of Thomas Robinson, she had also become “scurrilous in the highest degree.”1 Ambassador Murray, who had been quite happy in the company of the Wynnes in the past, casting his interested gaze on the girls, now plainly made fun of them in his dispatches to London. Mrs. Anna and her daughters were contributing “not a little” to the city’s “amusements,” he wrote to Lord Holderness. “Their manner of going on has been so very outré that I have no thoughts at present of visiting them, as I don’t care to be an eye-witness to the ruin of a family when there is no possibility of saving them.” 2
It was not just the atmosphere in the English community that felt different. The city as a whole had changed while the Wynnes had been away. The long war combined with Venice’s isolation had dampened spirits and accentuated a general feeling of stagnation. The more enlightened Venetians had lost their earlier enthusiasm for modernizing the state. Father Lodoli, the charismatic Franciscan monk, had left Venice in semiexile and was living out his last days in a state of destitution on the mainland. Little if anything remained of the hopeful band of reformists whom he had nurtured in the years before the war. The Tribunal of the Inquisitors had strengthened its oppressive presence in everyday life, and the secretive Council of Ten—the executive branch of government— ruled with a growing disregard for the Maggior Consiglio, the assembly of patricians that for centuries had been the very heart of the Republic.
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