Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [19]
Before leaving Rome for her surprise encounter with Alvise, Lucia took care of her personal appearance and hygiene. She went to the hairdresser and had two teeth pulled out “to clean up my mouth.” Her wisdom teeth were also bothering her, she reported candidly, “but the dentist has assured me that they won’t play any of their usual tricks on me.”61
By early October, only one thing remained to be done before leaving. Pope Pius VI had to return Memmo’s credentials—an awkward task since Memmo had never made his ingresso and so had never formally presented those credentials. There was a further delay, just long enough for the Vatican to make its displeasure known to the Venetian Republic. But the Pope did not want this issue to mar his friendship with Memmo, of whom he was genuinely fond. He granted a long and very satisfactory audience to the whole family, which left a lasting impression on Lucia. “We were told the Pope never has such long conversations with women,” she wrote to Alvise. “He asked us many kind questions, and even spoke to me about you. I really couldn’t have wished for more.”62
In the previous nine months, Lucia had thought so much and so hard about Alvise, alone at night in bed or else gazing at his picture during the day, that he had become a very familiar presence in her life, even though his image remained necessarily blurred since she had never seen him. Or had she? The closer she came to meeting him, the more she felt she had met him before. It was a strange sensation. Was it a distant, dreamy fragment of her childhood memory or perhaps an illusion generated by her long wait? “I feel as if I will not be meeting you for the first time,” she ventured, “but I am not able to explain to you when or where I first saw you. The faster I reach you the happier I’ll be to see you, to talk with you, and to feel that happiness I yearn for—provided we will like each other…Will I find a note from you in Florence?”63
At last the Memmos left. It was the end of October and the weather had turned rainy and cold. They travelled up the Cassia, the old Roman road that was little more than a trail of mud and water, stopping the first night in Bagnaia, near Viterbo. Memmo complained about the perpetual rain even as he wrote detailed instructions to Chiarabba from his rocking carriage. Lucia was to be taken to a convent, where she would remain with her sister until the wedding. Memmo had concluded this was the most convenient solution since he would no longer be living at Ca’ Memmo, the old family home on the Grand Canal, but on Saint Mark’s Square, in one of the comfortable houses that were made available to the Procuratori di San Marco. Meanwhile, rooms needed to be prepared for the night of their arrival, relatives to be informed, food to be purchased, gondolas to be readied. “We shall be no more than twelve to fourteen for supper on our arrival as I want the girls to go to the convent that same evening. Adieu, my friend. I feel I can already touch Venice.”64
Alvise, meanwhile, had crossed the Apennines under rain and sleet to surprise Lucia in Siena, a city he loved. They met on the evening of the second day of the Memmos’ journey north. Did their first encounter rise to their best expectations? Did