Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [157]
It is the last letter between the sisters to have come down to us. Paolina died shortly afterwards, leaving her sister completely bereft.
Lucia began preparing for her own death. She put her affairs in order, paid her outstanding debts, arranged her correspondence. She wrote her will. There was not much she could leave any more, not after having sold most of her properties to save Alvisopoli; but she made sure the house staff was taken care of after she was gone, and she set aside small sums and valuable objects for relatives and close friends to remember her by. She was very meticulous about her funeral arrangements, and specified everything from the number of torches to be lit, to the number of gondolas (only two) for the funerary procession, to the number of services to be celebrated after her death for the benefit of her soul. Her body was to be laid in a casket made of cypress wood (which her carpenter made for her), enclosed in a box of cheaper larchwood. She purchased a burial plot in the cemetery on the island of San Michele—she did not want to be buried at Alvisopoli, although she gave Alvisetto permission to transfer her remains there at a later date if it was important to him.11
Everything was ready, only the time to die had not come, and Lucia was to live through one more great upheaval.
Alvisetto’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