Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [156]
A few months later, in July 1844, the Bandiera brothers were arrested after a landing in Calabria, summarily tried and shot. They became the first martyrs of the Italian Risorgimento. Alvisetto’s little act of treachery was not divulged at the time so it did not lessen his standing in the liberal camp, and he was soon to become a player on the revolutionary stage in Venice.
Lucia settled into grandmotherhood, with its joys and sorrows. The first granddaughter, born in 1842, died in infancy. Three years later a boy was born; predictably, he was given the name Alvise and christened in the neighbourhood church of San Samuele, where a long line of Alvise Mocenigos had been christened before him. As customary, food was distributed to 300 poor families. The following year another boy was born, Giovanni. There was now a busy traffic between Lucia’s apartment and the adjacent one, occupied by Alvisetto’s family. The door separating the two was usually left open, as Lucia enjoyed dropping in on her daughter-in-law, Clementina, the way Chiara stopped by to see her after she had moved into Palazzo Mocenigo as a young bride.
The ghostly Venice of the twenties was a faded memory. The city was relatively prosperous again. The population was increasing. The shops were filled with goods from all over Europe. The canals were crowded with boats and the coffee shops were packed until late at night. The landscape of the city was changing: the Austrian administration approved plans to fill in and pave many side canals to improve circulation, and to build garden areas and promenades. Yet Venice remained a divided city, with the Venetians and the Austrians leading separate lives. In no place was the separation more evident than in Saint Mark’s Square, where Austrian officers sat at the tables of Quadri sipping coffee and listening to the orchestra play waltzes, while the Venetians crowded the smoke-filled rooms at Florian’s, across the square.
Although officially retired, Lucia led a busy life: she was very active on the board of La Fenice, the Venice opera house, she took care of her residual rental properties, she entertained small parties of younger friends*22 —most of her contemporaries having passed away—and she went out of her way to maintain good relations with Austrian officials.
Her lingering joy in her declining years was the company of Paolina, who still lived at Palazzo Martinengo, old Ca’ Memmo, up the Grand Canal from her. They saw each other as often as they could, and wrote daily, mostly about the vicissitudes of old age: sores, stomach seizures, discharges, regurgitations, throat lumps. Was the footbath giving relief? Was the magnesia having effect? The tone was sometimes caustic, sometimes humorous, always tender. When Lucia lost a blackened canine, she slipped it in an envelope and sent it to her sister “so that you may have the first fragment of my mortal spoils.”9
The winter in 1842 was especially harsh. “Stay where you are,” Lucia entreated her sister, who wanted to go to church despite having caught a chill. “This bitter cold will damage your health even inside the house. It says in the papers it is worse than in 1812, the year the French armies were forced to retreat in Russia…Promise me you’ll stay covered warmly, don’t go up and down the stairs unless you must…And take your meals near your [warm] bedroom. Adieu my dearest sister.”10