Lucia (41 page)

Everything was ready, only the time to die had not come, and Lucia was to live through one more great upheaval.

A
lvisetto’s opposition to the Austrians hardened in the face of Vienna’s reactionary politics, and by 1847 he was a strong supporter of Daniele Manin, the brilliant lawyer and scholar who was leading the nationalist movement in Venice. The Austrian police imprisoned Manin for seditious activities, but was forced to release him in January 1848 because of public protests. Alvisetto was at the prison gates to greet him and led the cheering crowd that carried him to Saint Mark’s Square.

Revolution was breaking out across Europe. In Vienna, Prince Metternich, the symbol of Austria’s repressive rule, was forced to resign. Anti-Austrian pressure continued to build in Venice. Fearing a popular insurrection, the military commander, Count Ferdinand Zichy, capitulated and withdrew his forces. On 23 March, Manin formed a provisional government and proclaimed a democratic Republic—an inheritor state of the Republic Napoleon had buried in 1797 at Campo Formio.

Vienna, however, had no intention of losing Venice. Austrian forces regrouped under Field Marshal Radetzky and marched back into northern Italy to recover the lost provinces. Manin’s government had two choices: join forces with Charles Albert, the ambitious king of Piedmont and Sardinia, or become the magnet for a more radical and democratic revolution in Italy. The liberal camp favoured joining the Piedmontese. Alvisetto, breaking with Manin, organised a public rally in support of this policy. The liberals won the day, and on 7 August the union between Venice and Piedmont was signed. However, it never took effect: the Austrians crushed the Piedmontese army at Custoza and took control of Lombardy and the Venetian mainland. The Venetian Republic stood alone, isolated in the lagoon. Manin was called back to lead the new emergency government. One of his first acts was to expel Alvisetto and other leaders of the liberal camp. At the end of August, Alvisetto, Clementina and the two boys, left Palazzo Mocenigo and sailed to Ravenna, and from there travelled on to Florence.

Lucia did not go with them—could not go, actually. Weeks earlier she had taken a tumble and badly damaged her hip. She was still trussed up and bedridden when Alvisetto and the rest of the family were forced to leave Venice, and travelling was out of the question. She grudgingly stayed behind, tended by the faithful Teresa, and a few other members of the house staff at Palazzo Mocenigo. It must have felt strange to see her son head for the same city where she and Alvise had been exiled half a century before.

In early September she was relieved to learn that Alvisetto and his family had settled into a pleasant Florentine house. “The air is excellent, we have a nice garden, and there is peace and quiet,” her son wrote, his only worry being “the damage the children might cause to the beautiful furniture.”
¹²
But it did not take long for the news to get worse. Alvisetto, in constant touch with his agents on his estates, reported to his mother that the Austrian soldiers had ravaged several properties, and some 1,400 Croatian soldiers were encamped at Alvisopoli.

In October, Manin’s government imposed a forced loan that hit landowners especially hard. Alvisetto, determined to show himself a good patriot, went deeper into debt to pay his share, borrowing from moneylenders, raising mortgages on everything he owned, signing promissory notes. The weight of “such a disproportionate levy” broke Alvisetto’s spirit. He was hurt by “the injustice, the personal hatred, the sheer ingratitude of [his] fellow citizens.”
¹³

Confined to her apartments at Palazzo Mocenigo, Lucia worried about the family in Florence and the perilous state of affairs the estate seemed to be falling into. Was Alvisetto making the right moves? Was he telling her everything? Often she felt she was being left in the dark. Meanwhile, food and fuel shortages were making life in Venice more uncomfortable each day. Her hip was slowly on the mend, but she had to be moved around in a chaise-longue carried by the gondoliers, who learnt to lower her in her gondola with great dexterity for her daily outings. Friends and relatives came by to keep her company in the evening. And she had a new best friend, an Englishman. Rawdon Brown had settled in Venice some years before and had become very knowledgeable about the city’s history (he thrived in Venice’s archives). Lucia was always pleased to see him appear at her door: he was amusing, vivacious and kept her well informed on the latest developments in Manin’s revolutionary government.

As Christmas approached, Lucia received a melancholy letter from Alvisetto. “In the face of misfortune,” he told her, “family ties grow stronger. I cannot tell you how often we speak about you, and how strongly we wish to be reunited with you.” He added, revealingly: “In revolutions such as those we are living in, men with great ambitions leap into the fray and either triumph or perish; men with small ambitions, such as myself, withdraw from the stage. One’s family becomes the greatest consolation.”
¹⁴

Alvisetto was being pressed by moneylenders to whom he had resorted at the time of the forced loan, and had reached the end of his tether. “I have nothing left in Venice, nothing left in the countryside,” he wrote in despair to his chief agent, Giovanni Pasqualini. “How is it possible that they cannot see this?”
¹⁵
At the end of 1848, he painted a disheartening picture for Lucia: “Dear mother, every time I look at the children I feel a chill as I think about their financial future, so gravely compromised already and at risk of total ruin if the current misfortunes continue.”
¹⁶
It did not augur well for the new year.

In February 1849, having obtained a short reprieve from his creditors, Alvisetto left Florence and took the family to Alvisopoli. The winter landscape was made bleaker by the devastation that had taken place during his absence. The Austrian troops had turned the fields, neatly tilled and sowed in the early autumn, into choppy seas of hardened mud. They had cut down the poplars along the dirt roads and levees to make fires, looted the grain stores and decimated the cattle stock. After the Austrians had left, moving south towards Venice, bands of marauders claiming to be “communists” had taken over plots of land and now had to be forcefully dislodged. It was hardly a warm return home. “The lack of ready cash and resources is such that we are forced to live in great economy,” he wrote in another gloomy letter. “We spend our evenings gathered around a single candle, and I keep sugar and coffee supplies under lock and key.”
¹⁷

In Venice, the situation was no better. The isolation of Manin’s infant Republic quickly brought on a collapse of living conditions. Food supplies disappeared from the stores. Public health worsened dramatically. Manin assumed dictatorial powers to maintain public order. In April, Radetzky’s army lay siege to the city by blockading the port and placing heavy artillery along the coastline. Manin, still naively hoping for help from France or England, enforced a policy of “resistance at all costs.” All through the spring and summer, the Austrians bombarded the city with tens of thousands of projectiles, and even dropped bombs with the aid of air balloons. The Venetians showed extraordinary strength of character and valour and resisted for nearly five months. But by the end of the summer they had no ammunition left. The famine was devastating the population. The water supply had long been exhausted and families were drinking directly from the canals. Sanitary conditions were ghastly. A cholera epidemic broke out and in a few weeks killed more than 3,000 people. The rotting corpses were literally piling up in the streets. Neither France nor England were going to lift a finger to rescue the besieged Republic. Manin finally capitulated on 22 August and sailed to exile in London. Radetzky’s troops entered the city. Venice had been the last bastion of resistance; Austria now regained full control of the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia.

L
ucia hardly recognised her son when he returned to Palazzo Mocenigo: he had grown a thick beard and was much thinner than when he had left. She was glad to have little Alvise and Giovanni scampering about the house again—how the two boys had grown in a year! Clementina, on the other hand, looked tired and drawn—in Alvisopoli she had had a very late miscarriage.

Alvisetto’s litany about his financial woes tapered off as the estates in the countryside resumed full production and the Agency started to generate more cash thanks to the Austrian reconstruction effort. Lucia was too old to start planning for the future, but she was relieved to see Alvisetto regain his enthusiasm for new business ventures. He wanted to invest in the food and drink business—“restaurants, coffee houses, wine shops and beer halls” for the Austrian clientele. The Mocenigo Agency owned many apartments and houses to rent in Venice and though money was still scarce among Venetians, Alvisetto was determined not to lower rents because, he said, “Very soon Venice will be extremely busy with foreigners.”
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Among the first foreigners to reach Venice after the siege were John Ruskin and his pretty young wife, Effie. They arrived in November 1849 by boat—the railway bridge was badly damaged during the revolution—and took rooms at the Danieli on the Riva degli Schiavoni. Ruskin took off on his architectural explorations, while Effie organised her own visits, normally in the company of the lively Rawdon Brown. “He has promised to present us to [Madame] Mocenigo whom he is very intimate with,” she wrote to her mother.
¹⁹
Effie was curious to meet Lucia, if a little intimidated. “She considers herself a sort of Queen in Venice as she is the last of the great Venetian Dames.” Lucia hardly thought of herself as a queen, though evidently this was how Mr. Brown was advertising her on his tours of the city. Effie gives a vivid account of her visit with Lucia:

It was in this Palace that Byron lived when in Venice…The walls of the rooms are covered with full length pictures of Doges of the family in their ducal robes, admirals and statesmen…We were received by some well dressed servants and conducted through a number of cold, grand marble and frescoed apartments, to some nice warm well furnished ones where sat the Lady on a small couch. She received us very kindly and considering her age, 80 years, she was extremely well looking and upright…As she can no longer go out she receives visitors all day or relations. Her manners were quite beautiful and took away from your first impressions caused by the absurdity of her dress which though excessively rich was not becoming for her age…Generally speaking her features were marked and fine and [she has] still sparkling black eyes her hair grey but false curls of jet black at each side of her face, the hair surmounted by a blonde cap with blue artificial flowers, a brown loose satin Polka cloak lined with white, hanging open and showing her neck very bare, pale yellow kid gloves and exquisite point lace collar and handkerchief, a fan and dress of purple & green silk…After we were seated she rang for the men servants and they entered instantly bearing on massive silver plate & cups, black coffee, cake and iced lemonade in tumblers. The latter I took and found delicious. She was very affectionate to me and kissed me on both cheeks speaking French, and presented me with a work written I suppose a century ago by her father…We took leave of the old Lady and walked through her sleeping apartment by her permission. Here I was much astonished by the toilette table; I had never seen anything like it before; there was the mirror frame, two little other mirrors, essence pots, rouge pots, perfume bottles and boxes of various kinds, everything in wrought silver. It was very beautiful.
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A few days later, Effie was introduced to Alvisetto at La Fenice. She was not pleased by what she saw, innocently remarking: “He is very like his old mother in appearance, but extremely dark, and certainly to look at him you never could believe he was a descendant of the doges who lie entombed in [San] Giovanni e Paolo, each Mocenigo face finer & more beautiful than the other, even in old age.”
²¹

M
r. Brown brought visitors around to Palazzo Mocenigo for a few more years. Lucia always rose to the occasion, dressing up for her guests and offering cake and iced lemonade in heavy silver tumblers. But in truth she was only waiting to join her beloved Paolina, her “other me.” She died on 7 March 1854, a month shy of her eighty-fourth birthday, and was buried, as she had wanted, in her cypress casket, on the island of San Michele.

In the end, Alvisetto decided not to transfer Lucia’s remains to the family chapel in Alvisopoli, where he and his children were later buried, next to Alvise, the founding father of the estate. There are no other tombs in the chapel. Despite the strenuous efforts to ensure a male line, the Mocenigos of San Samuele did not survive beyond the next generation.
^*23

Palazzo Mocenigo was sold many years ago and is now a prestigious condominium on the Grand Canal. There are no visible traces of Lucia, save for a plaque on the facade commemorating Byron’s stay and the mystifying statue of Napoleon hidden away at the end of the entrance hall. I recently visited the cemetery on San Michele to pay homage to my great-great-great-great-grandmother, but I discovered she no longer rests there: a century ago some of the older tombs were destroyed to make place for a wider mooring berth. Her bones, I was told, have long since dissolved in the silty waters of the lagoon.

Alvisopoli, the estate that caused Lucia so many worries over the years, was also sold, in the 1930s, and broken up in separate properties. But the hamlet of Alvisopoli still exists—a few houses, a general store, and the Bar Mocenigo are scattered along a sleepy back-road west of Portogruaro. After years of neglect, the main villa was recently restored and turned into a low-cost housing project. The park Lucia designed behind the house has miraculously survived the encroaching urban sprawl, and now borders the noisy
autostrada.
The local branch of the World Wildlife Fund tends it; paths and bridges and benches have been added to attract the local population, but visitors are rare. Few of the plants and trees Lucia brought from Paris in 1814 still grow there, but in the springtime a beautiful white and pink rose blossoms randomly in the sunnier parts of the wood. The gardeners do not know its provenance and call it the
Rosa moceniga;
but it is probably a variety of the
Rosa multiflora
that Lucia brought from Paris, and now grows wild in the garden of Alvisopoli.