When Archduke Paul and Archduchess Maria of Russia made a “private” visit to Venice in 1782 to honor the new commercial ties between the two states, she wrote a vivid account of what was possibly the last big extravaganza staged by the Republic. She wrote it in French, in the form of a long letter to her brother Richard, and it was published as a short book first in London and then in Venice. It was very well received in literary circles, and it remains immensely enjoyable to read today. Her old friend Casanova, who was back in Venice—now, ironically, working as a government informer and living in reduced circumstances—wrote her a fan letter praising her “easy and unpretentious style.” 13 She replied with a very formal thank-you note. Neither made the slightest reference to the past, nor did they renew their close friendship.
Writing was Giustiniana’s true calling. Her letters to Andrea bear testimony to her growing talent, of course, but now she devoted herself to the craft with more discipline and method. Her second book, also in French and published in London in 1785, was a collection of essays and reminiscences on a variety of topics, from education to the devastating effects of gambling. In one delightful chapter on the art of smiling there is a revealing passage that has its share of sorrow for the passing of time—she was then approaching fifty—but ends on a note of good-natured resignation:
Laugh heartily, charming and innocent youth! The age of smiling will soon be upon you. That will be followed in turn by the years of the expertly contrived smile: an air of peace and serenity will often hide the truly agitated state of your soul. And in your old age, when the book of passions is over, it will be too late even to smile. Your face will have lost all of that soft elasticity that allowed your expressions to change with so much ease. The Scissor of Time will have deepened those furrows drawn by the passions of your life: they will have become wrinkles that will never be erased. So what purpose could an awkward smile possibly have? It would only suggest ridiculous claims. An air of thoughtfulness and kindness will be all you really need. That is the natural order of things in the revolution that takes place on the face of a woman.14
Giustiniana established a pleasant, productive routine for herself. She wintered in Padua, making frequent forays into Venice. In the summer she moved to Alticchiero, a delightful villa on the southern bank of the Brenta, just a couple of miles from Padua, that belonged to her old friend Senator Angelo Querini. After his release from jail in 1763, the senator, disillusioned with Venetian politics, had retired to this “rustic house with no view.”15 Over the years, he had transformed it into an elegant country retreat devoted to classicism and the art of the “philosophical garden.”
Giustiniana’s friendship with Querini went back to the 1750s, but in those days her heart had belonged entirely to Andrea. She had kept in touch with Querini over the years—they shared many of the same friends, Andrea certainly being the first among them—but their paths had seldom crossed again until she left Venice for Padua. When finally they had the opportunity to spend time in each other’s company it was perhaps too late for a full-blown romance between them. Yet their friendship acquired a romantic tinge it never lost. At Alticchiero, Giustiniana was always more than a guest: she was the lady of the house.
In homage to her beloved senator she composed a lovely guidebook to the villa and the garden—an enlightened and highly entertaining tour of the Querini estate. It was published in Padua in 1787 with excellent prints of the sculptures that adorned the property.
There was another man in Giustiniana’s life at that time, very different from the senator. Count Bartolomeo Benincasa was an impoverished adventurer running away from a failed marriage in his native Modena when he arrived in the Venetian Republic sometime around 1780 and found his way into Giustiniana’s circle of friends. He was a restless soul with literary ambitions, which she admired, and he was also ten years younger than she. In little time he joined her household and became her secretary and administrator, and perhaps her lover as well.
Benincasa was the opposite of Querini: verbose, affected, and shady, he made pocket money passing information to the inquisitors about the senator and his guests at Alticchiero. Yet despite his duplicity, he remained devoted to Giustiniana until the end. In 1788, with his help, she published her only novel, Les Morlacques, a romantic tale of love and death set in the rugged mountains of Dalmatia. The book is imbued with social commentary inspired by Rousseau on the evils of the city and the essential goodness of man in nature, but the pathos she brought to the story—not to mention the vampires and fairies that populate its pages—are the product of an imagination that in many ways already belonged to the nineteenth century.
Les Morlacques was her greatest literary success. By 1790, at the age of fifty-three, Giustiniana was at the top of her game: beloved hostess, respected intellectual, accomplished writer. She had not remarried but seemed content with the affection of Querini and the devotion of Benincasa and her many friends. Describing her small salon in Padua, where men of sciences, writers, and artists mingled with foreign travelers, Casanova, who had moved on to Dux, in Bohemia, and was at last scribbling away at his memoirs, wrote that Giustiniana, though sadly not rich, nevertheless “shines for her wisdom and all the social virtues she possesses.”16
She would not enjoy her triumph for long. The illness that took her to her grave the following year—most likely cancer of the uterus—was already spreading inside her. She battled with it for nine months and suffered excruciating pain. An anguished Benincasa dutifully related the progress of the illness in letters to family and friends. Giustiniana’s twelve-year-old niece, Betsey, who was summering in the countryside north of Padua with her family, the Richard Wynnes, wrote in her diary: “The poor Countess is to die. There is no remedy for her. Papa says they are all in a very great distress about it.”17
As death neared Andrea too arrived in Padua—an old friend drawn to his first love. He was “distraught” by the sight of her ravaged body and the pain she was suffering, and he grieved quietly at her bedside. During the night “she started hemorrhaging again”; a priest was called in and “she was given extreme unction.” 18 In the diaphanous early morning light Andrea bid her his final farewell.
Giustiniana died on August 22, 1791, in the house she had rented for the summer: a small, elegant palazzo with a pretty garden. Benincasa wrote a long, tearful report on her death for the inquisitors. Querini nursed “the bitter wound”19 in his heart and placed a marble bust of Giustiniana in the garden at Alticchiero. She was buried in the Church of San Benedetto in Padua. Her brother Richard, who was with her at the time of her death, had a small memorial tablet placed in the church, high above the entrance portal.
Giustiniana was greatly mourned. Her virtues were praised in every form available, from the elaborate Latin inscription on the memorial’s marble plaque to a long panegyric printed by her friends. But to my mind the simple words of an obscure Paduan chronicler by the name of Abbé Gennari evoke her best. “She was very beautiful in her youth,” he wrote in his diary on the day of her death. “And always lively and full of spirit.”20
I like to think this is how Andrea remembered Giustiniana in the darkening rooms at Ca’ Memmo, where his own death was now casting its shadow. As he grew older, he revisited more frequently those hopeful days of his youth, when his heart had been filled with love and the end of the Republic had not loomed so near. No doubt he sometimes traveled as far back as the day he had first seen Giustiniana, so starkly beautiful, in the house of Consul Smith. Were those memories ever tinged with regret? Andrea was never one to dwell morosely on the past, but surely the irony was not lost on him that he had sacrificed the great love of his life for the sake of a dying Republic. He had served with great distinction. He had traveled widely. He had become a statesman, respected at home and admired abroad. He had accomplished what had been expected of him—and more. Yet each year he had grown more disgusted with the lethargic ruling class to which he belonged and more disillusioned about the future of Venice. Li
ke so many patricians of his generation, he had become a deeply cynical man. And he had tempered the bitterness in his soul by giving himself over to the earthly pleasures life still had to offer a man with appetite and, as he put it, “good teeth.”21
Andrea’s political beginnings had coincided with the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. Europe was at peace again, and he still believed that the strength and prestige of the Republic could be restored to a degree with the right mix of policies. He also felt that any radical approach to change would be counterproductive; in this he was far more pragmatic than his friend Querini, who spent two years in jail for openly challenging the status quo. Instead, Andrea focused his considerable intellectual energies on learning the inner workings of Venice’s venerable but outdated machinery of government. He learned fast and got himself elected to a succession of important administrative posts, blending into the bureaucracy as he waited for the most propitious moment to step forward and effect some real change.
On the personal side, his dalliance with M. failed to produce the stable relationship he had been looking for. But in 1763, at the age of thirty-four, he met a stunning girl some fifteen years younger than he with whom he began an affair that was to last, on and off, for more than two decades. Contarina Barbarigo was the beautiful daughter of her famously beautiful mother, Caterina Sagredo Barbarigo.24 She had wit, flair, and glamour. Eighteenth-century miniatures depict her with sharp, striking features, her hair piled up in a very tall beehive. Like her mother, she grew up to become the most celebrated Venetian beauty of her generation.
Did Giustiniana unwittingly plant the idea of seducing Contarina in Andrea’s head? In a letter she wrote to him during her depressing stay in Padua, back in the fall of 1760, Giustiniana mentioned paying a courtesy visit to Contarina’s famous mother, Caterina: “Mon cher frère . . . I can assure you that I was impressed by how cultivated and pleasant a lady she was. Her daughters are absolute wonders, and the one called Contarina is so gracious and well mannered—as well as being a real beauty and therefore very similar to her mother—that she is seen as a true marvel here. . . . In fact, she would be considered a sheer delight anywhere.”
Contarina, however, was destined for another member of the patriciate. In 1765 she married Marino Zorzi, but the marriage was soon dissolved because he was impotent. Her affair with Andrea resumed—if it had ever stopped. But the politics of marriage among the ruling class were inexorable. In 1769, the year before Giustiniana’s return to Venice from Austria, it was Andrea’s turn to marry. His bride was Elisabetta Piovene, a pretty girl of twenty who came from a good family in Vicenza. He does not appear to have been deeply in love with her, but there was no reason to believe they could not have a decent marriage and raise a good family. They had two daughters, Lucietta and Paolina, upon whom Andrea doted.
Andrea’s career, meanwhile, had reached an important cross-roads. In 1771, after a decade-long apprenticeship, he made his first important political move: a bold attempt to free Venetian industry and commerce from the suffocating control of the guilds. The reforms he advocated were intelligent and well thought out, but he found himself face to face with the “obtuse indolence”22 of the Senate. Ultimately defeated by the conservatives, he was nevertheless rewarded with the powerful post of governor of Padua.
He ran the city during much of the 1770s and became a popular governor. He devoted a great deal of his energies to an ambitious and somewhat extravagant architectural project—the creation of a vast oval plaza on the southern rim of the city, known as Prato della Valle—in which he tried to put into practice some of the principles of rational architecture advocated by his teacher Father Lodoli. His stewardship of one of the largest cities in the Venetian State was deemed a success. In 1777 he was appointed ambassador to Constantinople, a prestigious post and, for Andrea, a highly symbolic one: his uncle Andrea Memmo, his role model and mentor, had been ambassador there half a century earlier.
From the point of view of his career, the 1770s were productive and rewarding. “Four men like Senator Memmo would be enough to govern Europe without difficulty,”23 Emperor Joseph II of Austria is said to have declared after meeting Andrea. The statement might be apocryphal, but the currency it gained over the years reflected Andrea’s growing reputation as a wise and effective statesman.
His marriage to Elisabetta, on the other hand, was not a success despite a fairly hopeful start. Andrea’s continuous affair with Contarina cannot have helped. But family and friends mostly blamed Elisabetta’s “bilious” character and poor health—not to mention her habit of drinking vinegar in the morning to stay thin. With time she grew weaker and became more withdrawn. When she died of “gastro-rheumatic fever”25 in Venice in 1780, Andrea was not by her side but away in Constantinople, still serving as ambassador to the Porte.
During his five-year stint there—his first real time abroad—he began to see Venice’s decline in sharper, more dramatic terms. Still, he did not give up looking for new opportunities that might give the Republic another lease on life. Like Giustiniana, he was an admirer of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, and he worked tirelessly while in Constantinople to establish official relations with Moscow and build a powerful new commercial alliance with the emerging European power.
Upon his return to Venice in 1782, however, Andrea’s confidence collapsed. The passivity and resignation of his peers depressed him profoundly. He accepted the ambassadorship to Rome, once an important post but by then little more than a sinecure. “I decided not to stay in Venice for a while,” he explained to a friend, “because I knew it would have saddened me. I needed to distract myself for the sake of my health.” 24
He was fifty-four and a single parent with two daughters in tow when he arrived in the lazy and decadent Rome of Pope Pius VI. He had come to “distract” himself, as he had put it, and that is what he did. He cultivated the pleasures of a good table and threw himself into a whirlwind of sexual intrigue, becoming a favorite with Roman women—aging princesses as well as their shapely young maids. “Anything pleases these lovable sluts,” he confided to a Florentine friend, “as long as they can possess a man who was never possessed by any woman for more than a few minutes.” Tenderly, he added, “apart from la Rosenberg.”26
Andrea took his job as a father very seriously—possibly more so than his position as ambassador. Despite his numerous gallant affairs, he made a point of spending time every day with Lucietta and Paolina, “my only true loves.” He planned their education with the help of an able tutor and a French governess. “My girls will be beautiful and well educated. They’re still a little rough around the edges, but far less than they would be if they had stayed in Venice.”27
During his Roman days Andrea decided to rescue the memory of Father Lodoli from oblivion. The inquisitors had seized Lodoli’s papers after his death in 1761, leaving them to rot in a damp cell in the prisons at the Ducal Palace. Two decades later, during one of his regular trips up to Venice, Andrea went rummaging there. All he found were piles of sodden and illegible paper. The discovery filled him with sadness. It also encouraged him to press on. He plumbed his own memory and used every scrap of information he could find—notes, letters, and above all the recollections of the monk’s many devoted former students— to put together an extraordinary tribute to his teacher.
The first book of his two-volume work was published in 1786; the complete edition came out posthumously some fifty years later. Elementi dell’architettura Lodoliana was more than a book on Lodoli. The spirit of the 1740s and 1750s, when so many of the most promising sons of the Republic had “shaped their minds and improved their souls” at the school of the Franciscan monk, came to life again in its pages. In Andrea’s eyes, Giustiniana had been an important part of that bygone world, so that the memories of the period became entwined with memories of “the one to whom I was entirely dedicated.” In a whimsical, affectionate digression, he praised “her original mind” and those “rare qualities that made her soul subli
me.”28
Andrea’s book was so rich in autobiographical references to his own youth that one has to wonder if the daily exercise of writing it, during those otherwise dissolute Roman days, was not also an attempt to redeem himself from the failure to live up to his own expectations.
His career, however, was not yet over. Just as he was distancing himself from the depressing political scene in Venice, the Maggior Consiglio, the supreme assembly of the Republic, elected him to succeed Andrea Tron, his political mentor, in the prestigious office of procuratore di San Marco. All at once he was catapulted back into the fray. His initial displeasure at having to leave behind his leisurely if somewhat futile Roman life quickly vanished. This unexpected tribute on the part of his peers renewed his vigor. He returned to Venice in 1787 and took up his new position amid great pomp, decking out the palace on the Grand Canal with banners and family crests and hosting the customary balls and receptions.
That same year, at the end of a long and difficult negotiation, Andrea married off his daughter Lucietta to Alvise Mocenigo, a member of one of the richest and most powerful Venetian families. (It was thanks to this marriage that Andrea’s letters ended up at Palazzo Mocenigo, where my father found them two centuries later.) Andrea was doubly pleased: the match made sense from a practical point of view, and he was overjoyed because Lucietta and Alvise were genuinely in love with each other: “My Lucietta makes her husband happy, and he makes her happy. They are in love for their essential qualities, and they respect each other as much as they adore each other. They have become the paradigm of the enviable marriage. There are no displays of jealousy on either part nor the slightest appearance of infidelity.” 29
As was the custom, a stream of celebratory poems and miscellanies was printed at the time of the wedding. One slim publication, beautifully bound and illustrated, stood out among them. Giustiniana, by then living mostly in Padua, had come into town for the occasion and presented the bride and groom with a sweet allegorical composition in which Curiosity and Love conspired to join two lovers and then left the field to Perseverance—the only one who could make their happiness endure. She had written it in honor of Alvise and Lucietta, but it was, in fact, dedicated, in large, bold letters, to her own first great love—the father of the bride. She added these few lines, adapted from Lucretius, in which she invoked the aid of “nurturing Venus”:
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