Blood is Water

By Giulio Giustiniani

The story of a family, or better of families, told in an original way. It rebuilds uses, habits, ideas and education in the Italian aristocratic world between 1800 and the first half of the twentieth century. Written with irony and without prejudices, this autobiographical novel deals with Italian, British and Russian ancestors, and it is set between Florence and Lucca in Tuscany and also Venice. In this ironic and moving story it is possible to meet extraordinary characters introduced from the point of view of the author, when a child, a well known Italian journalist: a Doge, a Saint who made corpses revive, an English adventurer of the East India Compaly, the descendant of a Prince from Gengis Khan's tribe, cloister nuns. Characters that are good or bad, noble or evil, intelligent or stupid, to confirm the fact that aristocracy does not exist as a social class and that Blood is Water, as the title goes

• Language: English
• Publisher: Giulio Giustiniani
• Release date: Aug 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476110271

Giulio Giustiniani

GIULIO GIUSTINIANI was born fifty-four years ago in Florence, he has five children, and for forty years he was a journalist. He was managing editor of the “Nazione”, deputy editor of the “Resto del Carlino”, deputy editor of the “Corriere della Sera, editor of the “Gazzettino”, managing director of “La 7” television, director of the multimedia agency “Apcom”. Now he lives in Percoto, in Friuli, with his wife Elisabetta Nonino, the producer of the famous grappa. He is very fond of history of the customs and antique trade, his hobbies are gardening and cooking.

Book preview

BLOOD IS WATER

The Saint, The Doge, The Adventurer,

The Prince Of The Mongols And Other Relatives

By

GIULIO GIUSTINIANI

Translation By Daniele Tonelli

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Giulio Giustiniani on Smashwords

Blood is water

Copyright © 2011 by Giulio Giustiniani

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I have written these memories for my eldest children, Giovanni and Niccolò, for my younger twin daughters, Costanza and Beatrice, and especially for the middle one, Caterina, who is ten years old. She doesn’t understand how I could live half a century without her – I wonder how myself – and she’s curious about my previous life, my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents. In her bedroom she has the photograph of her grandfather, Nello, who she has never met, and once I found a moving card she had written for him. It’s our secret.

When I tell her something she gets the enchanted and puzzled air of who’s listening to fairy tales, at times she asks me if I’m mocking her. The world rushes. People that are close and real to me, look remote and unlikely to her. This is the way this book was born. I haven’t invented anything, I’ve only tried to remember the past as it appeared to me when I was a child and to read my family’s stories and diaries with the same attitude. If to someone else’s eyes something in this story is not true, I truly apologize. But it isn’t all my fault. The point is that children, thanks God, are neither historians nor reporters: they look with their eyes and especially with their heart, they see what they can see and understand what they can understand. Often much more than adults.

PART I

On a day of July a family friend arrived at the villa in Vallebuia, she used to frighten the servants on her arrival because she got in directly through the kitchen door. She had decided to take care of my grandparents, who, in her opinion, weren’t looked after with due attention, and she exhausted the cook teaching her always new dishes so that she could vary the menu. She wasn’t bad at all, actually she was good and pious. But life had wounded her cruelly. In 1944, on a war afternoon that looked like all the others, from a hill, in the distance, she had seen her villa on the lake of Massaciuccoli burnt by German soldiers. Two days later, among the smoking ruins and beams, she had found only the china doll of her seven year old niece and her old mother’s gold dentures. Nothing of her husband, her sister, of an old maid and her child. They had all been looking for six dead bodies, and they had found at least ten. They had loaded what was left on a cart, and only a woman of the place had recognized her partner from a hand. Since then countess Ciquita Minutoli Tegrimi had kept on praying and making up undaunted: to please God and her Eugenio, as if he were alive.

After reproaching the cook, as always, the countess had gone up into the frescoed room, where grandma was waiting for her, frightened and worried. Luckily they hadn’t started talking of lunches and recipes. I was hidden behind the big screen that hid the wood-burning stove. From there, through a chink, I saw Chiquita who was tossing on the armchair and asking all sort of information on a friend’s imminent marriage. Though a child, I understood that big black-dressed woman, with an indifferent air, kept going round the question she most had at heart: whether the bride came from an aristocratic family. Finally she stood stiff, took a deep breath, and asked sharply:

But Patrizia, what’s her birth?

Grandma yielded to a slightly sorrowful face, then shook her head disconsolate:

No birth, no birth.

Chiquita had a shock, but soon recovered. Better, she gave a conciliatory smile:

New blood makes good blood.

Grandma sighed with relief, and I secretly ran away into my bedroom to cry face down on my bed. How was it possible, in the late Fifties, that grandmother, so good and Christian, often even ironic, offended people she loved, denying even they had been born, as if they didn’t exist? It’s true she talked about these things with few reliable friends, who would understand them, like Chiquita. But I wondered how she could only think that way.

I had come to the idea that being aristocrats was a little like being Jews or homosexuals. I’m not joking. Though at home the servants called my grandparents and parents count and countess, it was not allowed to speak about aristocracy with the children for fear we could grow excited and take up superb attitudes. When I tried to go deeper into this quite troublesome matter, they answered hastily, or they lowered their voice, with embarrassment, just like when the conversation fell on those of the other side, the homosexuals, or the Jews, about whom we were supposed to speak well, after the tragedy of the Holocaust, but without forgetting they were really different, very different, in spite of their shareable love for culture.

About the Jews my ideas were very confused. Once a school mate was saying goodbye to me to go to the synagogue and, thinking I would please him, I told him that one day I would become a Jew myself. He had looked at me with an astonished smile, almost compassionate, and had answered with bother:

Jews are born, not made.

Right, I had thought, just as it happens to aristocrats. The Jews, however, managed to be themselves in the midst of the others, without becoming isolated as we did, and knew all the modernity of life. Aristocrats, on the contrary, were almost always on their own, and were shy, almost awkward. They even seemed to be a residue of history and had better hide a little in their past. They knew how to be light, that’s to say gentle-mannered in their gestures and words, but often only a very thin veil of education and good feelings prevented them from getting lost in a careless and bored cynicism. At times someone, when he felt offended, had sudden reactions, as if he wanted to restore an authority or a superiority lost decades before in a while.

In the late Fifties, in Lucca, nobody talked of noble and ignoble anymore, and it was undoubtedly a great progress. But there were still two well separated clubs, the one of the nobles and the one of the rich. The difference between who is born and who isn’t born was much more than a difference. It was a true diversity, which the others, those without birth, often underlined with sickly deference. There was a farmer who called me signor contino (young count), and an old lady praised my education with a compliment that every time left me dumb: It is clear that blood isn’t water.

Sometimes, anyway, deference disappeared, no matter whether true or not, and things were even worse: as when some teachers expected from me more than from the others. I perceived then an ill-concealed diffidence, a poisonous trail of grudge and prejudices, as if a child like me had to pay for the ancient and shameful faults of his world. Then, for fear of not being accepted, I multiplied all the seductions I was able of. However, no matter how natural I was, I slightly blushed when the others dealt with this topic and was very careful.

Once, in Florence, where I lived a quiet middle class life and attended public schools, I went to play at Andrea’s, one of my school mates. When there, without thinking, I kissed his mother’s hand when she came to open the door. She jumped back and then, when she recovered from the surprise, burst into loud laughing, and she couldn’t stop: You are really crazy, what do they teach you, to kiss the hand of a greengrocer like me?

About aristocracy, my grandfather on my mother’s side loved the respect of traditions, good taste, education, the diffidence towards a certain arrogant modernity, the slow and habit-bound rhythms of life. But he was too intelligent and Christian to be pleased with or boast about his origins. On the contrary, once, when my questions had become too insistent, he had closed the matter with annoyance: Dear Giulio, there are well educated and ill-mannered aristocrats, respectable and rogue, exactly as there are tall and short, handsome and ugly, rich and poor people. Believe me, nothing can define aristocracy as such, and therefore aristocracy doesn’t exist. It is neither a rank nor a class. Noble is only who can join a good surname, which is something that doesn’t harm, with some true and personal merits: culture, sensibility, education and industry. The rest is foolishness and pride.

TO KEEP AT A DISTANCE

I was like the others, therefore, though I had to keep at a distance from the others. One day my grandparents and my mother had shut themselves in the study with conspirators’ air, without realizing I was hidden there about, as always. What I heard grandma say sounded an enormity to me:

Now children are grown up, it’s time for them to spend less time in the kitchen. There, out of great affection, everybody works to spoil their education, to sow futile needs and wants in their heads. When I was a child I was forbidden from entering certain rooms. Better, servants should start addressing the children with the polite form and not with familiar terms. I had to speak that way even to my mother, imagine how the maids treated me.

My mother didn’t have time to reply, when grandpa added:

The familiar form is too intimate. It allows the servants to have too much familiarity and liberty. When the children grow up they won’t be able keep them at the right distance, they won’t be able to command respect and obedience.

That time my mother, Tussina, as my grandparents called her, had one of her valuable outbursts of democracy: It’s completely out of question, she stated. And went out of the room disappointed, as it was convenient for a countess who had been for the republic, instead of monarchy, and once, but only once, had voted for the socialist party.

I breathed again. The problem of too much intimacy with the servants wasn’t of little matter. Had it been for me I would have solved it cancelling any distance at all. In that big villa, escaping from time, life had found a refuge in the kitchen, a large room full of people and voices, food and smells, even vapours. Lina, the cook. Eugenia, the waitress. Saul, who sometimes got crazy and ran after the children with a stick, His brother Guido, who took care of the orchard and the garden. Someone else for occasional works. Then the neighbours who kept on stopping for a chat, sometimes with the excuse of giving me a small bunch of strawberries collected while they were cutting grass for the rabbits.

That kitchen was as alive as a village square, it was the world outside that finally revealed itself. Births and deaths, stories and chats. We talked about the tailor’s daughter who was pregnant and had been abandoned by her boyfriend: he had run away to America, she had just known it, chased by grandpa’s furious letters. We blamed a farmer who had cast a spell on a neighbour, who pleaded for justice, and we all were convinced grandpa, as always, would settle the situation. We talked of a mother who worked in the fields, she didn’t know where to leave her children, and therefore she closed them into an uncovered tub and they cried for hours. That time grandma had got really angry, when she had known it, so she had taken her purse and run to make a scene to the farmer and a present to the peasants.

In the kitchen everybody pretended to be concentrated on what he/she was doing, but they slowed down the movements when the conversation became more delicate, caught by slight concern. From time to time, in fact, grandma broke into the room to take me away. She considered me too curious for my age, and protested: Send him out, there’s work to be done here! And I followed her for some time, ready to run away at her first moment’s inattention. I knew how to conquer a front row seat near the fireplace. All I had to do was to say this sentence: Do you know what happened in the other room? – and there was a chair for me. All I had to do was to tell in the kitchen a lot of what had been said in the sitting room and in the sitting room a little of what had been gossiped in the kitchen. The more because Eugenia was a real specialist in this.

Only once I made an unforgivable mistake. I told my grandmother that I had put my hand in the dish where Saul was grating cheese, to take a bit, and Saul had slapped me. Grandma scolded me because I had stolen, but immediately after left for the kitchen with a pace that promised nothing good. We could hear screams even worse than those of the night when she had gone up to the top floor, where the servants lived, because Saul and Assunta were quarrelling, screaming and throwing things at each other. Fights and jealousies, besides, marked the life of the service staff and, as a consequence, that of the lords, who were continuously compelled to intervene and judge, even if they didn’t want.

Grandpa was so sure he could command that he almost never did it. Grandma, on the contrary, was not able to cook a fried egg, but she was demanding and strict with the service staff. The style and reputation of a family, at those times, depended also on the behaviour of the servants. So she was shocked because in her sister’s house these common women felt the duty of encouraging the guests to eat, as once was allowed, instead of attending at the table dumb and blind, the way now British style education imposed. She reproached my mother because in our house she was too talkative and kind with the servants. She got angry with Eugenia because she often felt sick and stayed in bed. She got offended with Lina, who had asked for a salary increase, because the families at Vallebuia had become two for many months a year, and, in spite of the allowance, she kept her usual bad mood.

She always thought all this, but she almost never told anyone. She was too good to do it, and above all she considered being rude or even ill-treating the servants the worst form of bad education. Orders already sound disagreeable by themselves – she explained to me – the least we can do is to sweeten them with some kindness. If she really had to reproach someone for a serious fault, she conferred long with all the people of the family to find the most suitable words, those that would not sound offensive at all. So she exhausted grandpa above all. Until one afternoon he got fed up of listening to the disputes of the staff, he put the Gospels he was reading down on the table, and said irritated:

And you, what would you think if we were in the service staff’s place?.

Grandma didn’t turn a hair – much more was needed to stop her – and smiled:

I would never hire one like you as a servant.

Unluckily one day came the asphalt on the dusty road leading to the villa, and with the asphalt the aqueduct, which made the water of the well clear, until then ivory coloured, and progress was brought also in the kitchen. Not under the form of house-hold equipment, but through the cost of the service staff. They were no longer satisfied with food and lodging, a uniform and a little money, as just after the war. They asked for salaries and contracts. So the resident servants were reduced to three with everybody’s dismay. Some small people from Sardinia came, better Sardinians, as grandma called them, but they spoke in a strange way and looked very little decorative.

THE BISHOP’S VILLA

The Villa dei Tre Cancelli (Villa of the Three Gates), called in this way after the gates with their four cut-off columns that closed the long cypress avenue, was situated in Vallebuia, few kilometres from Lucca, along the road climbing to Monte Magno and then descending steep and winding to Camaiore. Built in the Sixteenth century, it had been enriched two centuries later, in 1725, after examining and discarding several designs made by the great architect Filippo Juvarra. Baroque as, in Tuscany, only in Lucca it could be, it was more elegant than stately.

Between the late Nineteenth and the early Twentieth century the German poet and essayist Rudolf Borchardt, a Prussian Jew from Konigsberg, had rented that house and hid himself to live there and skip the bothers of celebrity. He was remembered by a stone on the façade. For him Vallebuia hadn’t been only a buen retiro. He had described it in a famous essay as the quintessence of the Tuscan villa, bare and thrifty, able to mix architecture and landscape in perfect harmony, the pleasure of resting in the country with the care of rustic interests. The great lawns of the garden had an ornamental function, but they were also used to produce pasture for the stables. And from the windows, among the high trees disposed with art, it was possible to see the fields and the red painted farmhouses, almost guarding them,.

That house, for Borchardt, still represented ancient, Latin, rustic Italy, which gathered wealth and wisdom, greatness and reluctance. The villa – he wrote – takes the aspect of an old country house already on account of the hardy hands that mark the time on the clock faces, a little faded but easy to see on the two sides of the high façade. The fine balcony on the top floor, in fact, was sided and ennobled by a clock and a sundial, which beat the time of work and the seasons of the country.

My grandmother, in the late twenties, had brightened the house with that sort of calculated disorder of flowers and plants that English people, in the Nineteenth century, had imposed on Tuscan gardens, until then too formal and strict. Thanks to their romanticism the old parks did no longer look landscapes painted by a Spanish painter, or oases of flowers prisoners of the design of the gardener. They had become wild nature, nostalgia and dream. The most beautiful ones just allowed seeing the ancient geometry of their hedges, and the lost strictness, as if, all of a sudden, a new young mistress, sensitive and a little crazy, had had them uncombed and confused because of her joyful fancy.

Maybe who loves beauty, one day, must allow himself the frenzy of a garden of his own, and build it with passion and patience. Just like my grandmother, and like Monet, who after years of painting had felt the need of abandoning the canvases to replace them with the catalogues of flower growers. No more paintbrushes, but spades and shears. No more colours but the ones of nature in Giverny. He didn’t let his fellow painters and writers – Renoir and Anatole France, Clemenceau and Mallarme – see his paintings, but that garden invented like a painting, the original of each still life and each living water lily.

In spite of that vaguely evil name, at Vallebuia even the landscape was so sweet and relaxed that it looked painted by a delicate and melancholic artist: where corn and fruit fields finished, the hill climbed sweetly, covered with vineyards, as far as the oaks of the wood on the top. In the evening, at sunset, the mountains faded violet in the sky, wounded only by the sharp tops of the Apuan Alps, white with marble, in the distance. Nothing left of the ancient forest that had given those lands the name of Vallebuia and had offered wild pigs, deer, bucks, foxes and some wolves to the desire of hunting and amusement of the gentlemen of Lucca.

At about mid One Thousand Pope Alexander II, already the bishop of Lucca, started to deforest that valley, to drain the marshes, to regiment the Freddana river, which almost every year caused devastations with its terrible floods. The Church made fields out of forests, let the land out to farmers, sheltered many Florentine families who had run away after the riot of the Ciompi, in the late Fourteenth century. Finally, they sold everything to the richest bankers and traders in town, the new aristocrats that started to gather vast estates.

When I was a child only some bad weather days gave a meaning to those two words stuck together, valley and dark. Thunder storms were short but terrible: the day turned into night, and that night was lit by thunders and lightning, the gravel in the garden was flooded by water, the wind bent the trees as if it were the fist of an immense and raging hand. Then, all of a sudden, as it had come, the rain ceased and the land started to smoke for vapours like a horse after a long winter gallop. Fantastic rainbows appeared, and the usual serene landscape returned, coming out shyly of the mist of dawn and fading after furious sunsets.

In 1788 the last Benassai, abbot Pier Francesco, had decided to leave that villa, his lands and his surname to a young gentleman that was an aristocrat and possessed talent and virtue. He had entrusted with the choice of the fortunate heir the archbishop of Lucca, Filippo Sardi, who, without too much fantasy, had immediately decided to award Cesare, the younger son of his family as well as his favourite nephew. This unforeseen heredity had given birth to disputes and trials with the abbot’s relatives, but he had proved to be extremely wise. Cesare, since then Sardi Benassai, had soon become important. In 1814 the government had sent him with a delegation to the Congress of Vienna, which had to redraw the map of power in Europe, and there he had fought bravely, but uselessly, to let Lucca have back the ancient autonomy it had been able to save for two centuries before surrendering, the last Italian town, to French troops. After that chaotic and courtly congress, where everything had been decided more in the recesses than in official meetings, Cesare had become State Councillor of the Bourbons and Road and Water Commissary, as in those times it was possible to go from Lucca to Pisa by boat along canals and lakes. I seem to be in Paris again, he wrote in his diary, happy of his success and his possessions.

One and a half century later in the villa of the Three Gates there was still a fine portrait of the benefactor uncle, made in Rome when he was an assistant to the papal throne. And there was also, and above all, his funerary plaster mask: the imprint of his bony and ascetic face frightened us children because it was above the altar of a very little chapel, on the ground floor, where grandma used to say the rosary together with the service staff, everyday for two months a year.

The Archbishop of Lucca for forty-two years, Filippo was adored in the family as a saint but also as a hero. In fact he managed to survive revolutions and restorations, preserving his power and his prestige intact. He never let anyone frighten him. He made his sermons longer when the French army arrived, in the last year of the Eighteenth century, and for their fault a town strict for order, religion, and habits, had turned into a brothel. He multiplied the masses when the rudest screaming Jacobins occupied the boxes at the theatre and the nobles did their best to keep them quiet. He doubled the spiritual exercises when the aristocrats could no longer stop in the streets to talk, they were laughed at, often arrested, so that a Sardi citizen had to hide himself and go to live in a hut in one of his woods because wanted. He increased the charitable works when those occupiers, stealing and taxing, gave the final blow to the economy of the town, already tried by the crisis of silk industry. There were even protest marches never seen before in the streets of the town. Desperate women crying Hunger, hunger.

He, the great Archbishop, never stepped back, even when the republic woke up as a Principality and a certain Mr. Baciocchi was raised to the rank of Prince just because his wife Elisa was Napoleon’s sister. The French Emperor despised Lucca, which he called the dwarf Republic, and the people of Lucca returned the aversion keeping on calling his sister la Madame. They were grateful to her only because she had brought some good French vines into the territory of Lucca, and also into the countryside of Vallebuia.

The great Cardinal managed to reconcile faith and power so well that, in the period of transition between the end of the Napoleonic regime and the Congress of Vienna, he was appointed president of the town Senate and so became the highest civil and religious officer of the State. It had never happened before, but he didn’t grow proud and neither changed. While all the people started to smile again, he continued to see Jacobins and immorality everywhere like when there were the French. He didn’t hesitate at throwing out of the cathedral the noble-women that weren’t properly dressed. He thundered against the costumes of the town, where too many people gambled and there was even a well known lady, one of the last courtesans, who breast-fed her puppy. He was angry also against Maria Luisa of Bourbon, the new duchess coming from Parma, a religious but very young and inexperienced person, because she invited too many rank guests on the State’s charge: Those visits don’t destroy the fields like the war – he complained from the pulpit – but drain the treasury.

Until he had with her a serious diplomatic incident. In his eighties and unsteady on his legs, he led the great Corpus Christi procession walking so slowly that he made it last a whole afternoon. The aristocrat cavalry, which had just been reconstituted, pawed in disorder and impatient at the back of the procession. The duchess became irritated and let the cardinal know that the following year she’d rather have him stay in the Parish. He got offended, and answered her with a letter in which he explained that religious ceremonies were not court affairs: I will lead the procession – he concluded – as long as my legs sustain me. The poor duchess had to surrender in front of his obstinacy and especially of his popularity.

He was a saint man, and when old, during the terrible 1816 famine, he sold even his diamond pectoral cross and his bejewelled ring to help the families that didn’t have enough to eat. In 1825, at the age of eighty-nine, he paid the fourth and last pastoral visit on the mountains of Garfagnana where his poorest parishioners lived. The following year he died.

LABOUR AND SWEAT

At that time I understood very little of those ancestors that seemed lost, or better missing, in far and extravagant adventures. But grandpa Gianni was afraid we, grandchildren, could forget their importance, and we could resign to the idea that the old families could give their history, as the last contribution, only the homage of a dignified and melancholic surrender. So he spurred us to fight to preserve our part in life, and told us the family events enriching them with all the little particulars that could make them interesting, pleasant, and especially edifying.

The Sardis were an old family of silk weavers (velvet weavers) and bankers, who came from Varese Ligure and in the Sixteenth century had accumulated quite a good fortune in Lucca thanks to their business and the wisdom of leaving all their properties always to a single heir, the firstborn son. With time they had become very wise because bankruptcy, in the Seventeenth century, had compelled one of them, who grandpa called poor Lorenzo to hide in St. Paolino’s church before escaping abroad, in Messina, to avoid life imprisonment, which he had been condemned to.

Since then in their wills they wrote about their properties always stating they had been acquired with endless difficulties, efforts and sweat. They were documents written in four languages – Italian, English, French and German – because the youngest children, if they didn’t become priests, were sent to study abroad, especially to the Academy in Paris, and then sent to open commercial enterprises in the most important European cities and even cotton plantations in the far Americas. They had to give account of their integrity to the terrible family priests, who had remained in their home country, and help the head office in doing business, namely their father or eldest brother.

Lucca, between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century, wasn’t an ordinary town. It was compared to Calvin’s Geneva, the country of adoption of ancient rich protestant families from Lucca who had escaped there in the Sixteenth century. Foreigners inserted it in their grand tour in Italy with admiration and a hint of envy. It was the capital of a model State, even if very small: ordered and clean, modern and so cultured that in one of its printing houses the second edition of Diderot and d’Alambert’s Encyclopaedia, forbidden in Paris, had been printed.

Some time had passed, actually, since the old republic had transformed itself into an oligarchic and conservative state, from democratic it had become aristocratic, because of laws that even came to call shameful the marriages between nobles and common people and indecent the ones between nobles and middle class people, unless the latter were extremely rich. But nobody was scandalized by the fact that few families held all public places in turns, and not even that the Sardis, in their trips to Pisa, had themselves taken with a sedan chair, as if they were ancient Romans, by peasants divided in shifts. Nobody considered excessive that the family, in 1742, bought a damask lined coach in Milan, with crystals at the door, for the unbelievable amount of 4,056 lire.

These and other stories scandalized me, but grandpa swore Lucca was, at that time, a modern State, much fairer that others. Rich, peaceful, without criminality or duels. Incoming foreigners had to give their weapons at the door of the town, and they could have them back, showing the receipt, only at the moment of their departure. The very few times a hangman was needed, to hang someone, he was sent for in Florence, because there wasn’t enough work to hire one in town.

It was in a Republic like this, so weak and intelligent to have good relations with all the great European countries, where the family business grew and branched abroad. The most thriving branch was Banco Sardi in Amsterdam, led by Lorenzo Antonio, but grandpa told us that the most charming was certainly the Polish one, given in the Seventeenth century to Bartolomeo, a spendthrift who had governed it for half a century.

The latter had married a very ugly woman, at least according to her portrait in the sitting room in Vallebuia, but intelligent and powerful: Eufrosina von Gratta, a noble Prussian with far Genoese origins, the widow of Andrea Baier, a great notary public of the Polish reign. She was a skilled and ambitious woman, but hated by her Italian relatives. When her brother in law, archdeacon Ottavio, had gone to Venice to meet her, during a carnival, she had showed up in his room without being announced and moreover dressed in mask. A scandal the prelate, the true