LA SERENISSIMA WILL be a more human place for anyone who has read this well-paced account of a passionate but ultimately doomed eighteenth-century romance between a young girl of uncertain rank and a Venetian nobleman of impeccable birth.

Giustiniana Wynne was the attractive, intelligent daughter of a wealthy English gentleman who came to Venice after the death of his first wife. The Republic was enjoying its dissolute, socially ossified swan song. After a period, 'to dissipate his affliction for the loss of his lady' (as Lady Mary Wortley