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for his successor before leaving Rome. And the new ambassador, much to Memmo’s irritation, was taking his time winding his way down from Venice with his wife and retinue. Memmo had never quite gotten used to “the deadly heat that springs from the earth” during the summer in Rome, which he found “much more unbearable” than in Venice. “The air is literally on fire,” he complained to his agent, “and in order to breathe you must lock yourself up even more than in winter.”53 Palazzo San Marco was surrounded by three large squares that turned hard and dry “causing everyone to eat a lot of dust.” His neighbours “tormented” him and pressed him to cover the scorched earth with gravel, like everyone else did. But that was yet another expense Memmo would not put up with, especially now that he was preparing to leave.

Society life ground to a halt in July and August. The Corso was deserted most of the day. The great palaces emptied as the Roman nobility retreated to their summer villas in the hills south of Rome, where the temperature was several degrees cooler and a pleasant breeze blew in from the Tyrrhenian Sea. But renting a villa was a luxury Memmo could not afford. “Too much money for the sake of a little coolness,” he grumbled. To alleviate the tedium of those long summer days, Memmo organised a day-trip with the girls and Madame Dupont to the waterfalls at Tivoli. He took them on a picnic by the Roman pool at Hadrian’s Villa. And he found some respite from the heat during their frequent excursions to the early Christian catacombs on the Appian Way, just beyond the southern city gate. In the evenings, Memmo gathered the few friends who were still in town for a light dinner at home, followed by ices and a little musical entertainment, usually provided by Lucia and Paolina. On one of these intimate occasions, Lucia, feeling playful, appeared among her father’s guests wearing a bracelet with an image of Sebastiano on her left wrist and one with Memmo’s image on her right wrist, and with the miniature of Alvise resting as usual upon her breast. “You won’t believe the things I sometimes put on,”54 she wrote to Alvise.

That summer the artist Angelica Kauffmann was among Lucia’s favourite companions. Memmo had commissioned her to paint a formal portrait of himself clad in the traditional red brocade robe of the Procuratore di San Marco, to take back with him to Venice. He took the opportunity to commission twin portraits of his two daughters as well, in order to have a family set. Kauffmann’s studio was on the Via Sistina, just off the church of Trinità dei Monti. A number of painters and sculptors had recently moved into the area from Piazza Farnese, and Kauffmann, then at the top of her fame, was very much at the centre of this thriving community of artists. The large house she lived in with her husband, Antonio Zucchi, was filled with sculptures and busts and classical paintings. It was a lively and welcoming haven for fellow painters and writers, dealers and travellers, and for the more adventurous members of the Roman aristocracy and the diplomatic corps. The studio, stacked with canvases and cluttered with easels, brushes, jars and powdered pigments, was at the end of the house, overlooking an unruly garden. Memmo often made the short trip from Palazzo San Marco to the atelier in Via Sistina with his daughters, and he encouraged Kauffmann and her husband to take Lucia and Paolina to visit the studios of their artist friends.

One August afternoon, the antiquarian Johann Raiffenstein joined Kauffmann, Zucchi, Lucia and Paolina, and together they braved the heat to go see the new painting everyone was talking about in Rome. It was by Jean-Germain Drouais, the twenty-three-year-old protégé of Jacques-Louis David. He had won the Prix de Rome and had installed himself at the French Academy. Some critics thought his talent surpassed that of his famous mentor. The large canvas he had just completed depicted the Roman general Marius, wrapped in a scarlet robe, as he stared down at the soldier who had come to murder him in prison after