Jonathan Keates
Palazzo Plunkett
Lucia in the Age of Napoleon
By Andrea di Robilant
Faber & Faber 316pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
Lucia Mocenigo, heroine of this book, was a creature of flesh-and-blood reality, but her place is essentially in a novel. Among her immediate contemporaries, Stendhal could have worked this courageous and resourceful figure into La Chartreuse de Parme, and Goethe might have fashioned a new version of The Elective Affinities from her sentimental adventures as a married woman. There is a touch of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale about her later years as a penny-pinching landlady on the Grand Canal, and a hint or two of Isak Dinesen in the final version of her, in rouge and false curls, offering iced lemonade to Effie Ruskin in the only heated salon of an otherwise freezing palazzo. By the time Lucia died in 1854, aged eighty-three, her life had become what sociologists like to call a paradigm, its variety of experience summarising a whole epoch of European history.
Her pedigree was Golden Book Venetian, as she was the daughter of Andrea Memmo, La Serenissima’s ambassador to the Papal States and descendant of one of the ancient republic’s first doges. Recently widowed when he arrived in Rome, Memmo was a wise father, anxious to secure good matches for Lucia
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
literaryreview.co.uk
Offer ends soon! Take advantage of our best ever Black Friday offer and get a year's subscription for £29.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/blackfriday/
Our best ever Black Friday discount!
Offer ends on Monday.