Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [158]
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