Lucia in the Age of Napoleon
Andrea di Robilant
Faber and Faber, HK$330
It's handy for a writer to have illustrious forebears suitable for a biography. It is handier still if the writer discovers unknown documentation about their ancestors, as Andrea di Robilant did when he wrote The Venetian Affair about a clandestine love between one such forerunner and an Englishwoman.
It has happened again with his great-great-great-great grandmother Lucia, who married Alvise Mocenigo from one of the oldest and most distinguished Venetian families.
Di Robilant found a cache of five decades of letters between Lucia and her younger sister Paola, along with other undiscovered documents. They helped him create a portrait of Lucia in the decades bridging the 18th and 19th centuries when Venice lost its independence to Austria and France.
Di Robilant's research enables him to follow each phase of Lucia's 83 years - from the dutiful spouse of distant husband Alvise, a statesman and farmer, to a lady-in-waiting at the court of Napoleon, to a society dame in imperial Venice, to Paris where she developed scientific interests, and finally to the tough farm manager and landlady of her last years.
