Lucia

By Andrea di Robilant

In 1787, the beautiful Lucia 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. We witness Lucia's painful series of miscarriages and the pressure on her to produce an heir; her impassioned affair with an Austrian officer; the glamour and strain of her career as a hostess in Vienna; and her amazing firsthand account of the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. With his brave and articulate heroine, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 22, 2008
• ISBN: 9780307268570

Reviews for Lucia

[setnahkt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[marthajeanne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[kasthu_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[ros0peters · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.