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and beautiful wife of Count Guiccioli from Ravenna. Byron became completely besotted by the manipulative, twenty-year-old Teresa, and a few weeks later, at her beckoning, he followed her and her husband to Ravenna. Before leaving, he made sure Richard Hoppner, the British consul who had negotiated the lease with Lucia and took care of Byron’s business affairs in Venice, had enough cash to pay the second instalment of his three-year rent at Palazzo Mocenigo. But by early summer, the rumour was that Byron was so taken by his new love that he did not want to return to Venice, and was looking for an early release from his contract. Lucia became alarmed: she was counting on the income for the entire three years to put her accounts in order in Venice. The law was on her side and she was not about to offer any favours.

Alvisetto, meanwhile, had again disappeared. Lucia had approved a trip to Rome and Florence on the grounds that it would help him build up useful connections, on condition that Vérand go with him. Now she regretted sending them off. Alvisetto’s rare letters were vague and not very reassuring. What was he up to? Who was he seeing? “He never mentions any prominent Roman family and I hope he has not been negligent in forming honourable and useful relationships,” she wrote to Vérand. “Surely he must understand that such connections are useful in times of difficulty.”34

Vérand was not in the mood for Lucia’s long-distance lecturing. He complained to her that Alvisetto considered his presence a weight, and that he often excluded him from his social engagements and his amusements. Also, his brother was dying and he wished to travel to Lyon as soon as possible. Could he please be released of his duties? “Such hurry to go to Lyon is understandable,” Lucia replied with impatience, “but grant me the favour of going there after my son’s return to Venice (somehow my ears don’t like the sound of your proposal to leave him before bringing him back to me).” Alvisetto, unbeknownst to his mother, took it upon himself to grant his tutor a leave. Lucia was furious. “I cannot and will not consent to this,” she wrote to Vérand, who was already in Florence. “I expect to see my son returning as he left—I would be offended if it were otherwise. To change plans that were agreed to at the moment of separation is simply not right.”35 Vérand stopped in his tracks, fearful of incurring Lucia’s wrath; he suggested that she take a brief vacation and join Alvisetto in Florence. “It would be very pleasant to join him for at least part of the journey,” she replied with irritation, “but how could I possibly entertain a project that would take me away [from Alvisetto’s] business affairs, which are neither few nor easy to tend to. The voice of reason tells me that I must manage his properties as best I can. Let me be clear: if I go, who stays?”36

It was time for them to come back, Lucia insisted. They had been away three months; it was long enough. Alvisetto needed to be in Padua to prepare for his last year at university and his final exams. “Besides, he has completed the tour of all the beautiful cities in Tuscany; to linger would mean that he is staying only to amuse himself, which he can do at any time and in any place…I am alone here and I need assistance.”37

With Alvisetto safely back in Padua and Vérand off to France, Lucia finally focused on the pressing problem presented by her glamorous but unreliable tenant. Under Teresa Guiccioli’s influence, Byron was growing critical of, even hostile to, the decaying city that had seduced and inspired him for more than two years. In Ravenna, removed from the vortex of dissipation, he was like a reveller waking up in the diaphanous early morning mist. He had lived too crazily; he had spent far too much money. The huge staff, the gondola, the horses he kept at the Lido, the casini (small pleasure houses) he rented in Venice and on the Brenta: such an extravagant set-up did not make sense to him any more. The most urgent step was to leave Palazzo Mocenigo and the two casini.

Byron asked his friend Alexander